Buckyball sandwiches

Abstract

Two-dimensional (2D) materials have considerably expanded the field of materials science in the last decade. Even more recently, various 2D materials have been assembled into vertical van der Waals heterostacks, and it has been proposed to combine them with other low- dimensional structures to create new materials with hybridized properties. Here, we demonstrate the first direct images of a suspended 0D/2D heterostructure incorporating $C_{60}$ molecules between two graphene layers in a buckyball sandwich structure. We find clean and ordered $C_{60}$ islands with thicknesses down to one molecule, shielded by the graphene layers from the microscope vacuum and partially protected from radiation damage during scanning transmission electron microscopy imaging. The sandwich structure serves as a 2D nanoscale reaction chamber allowing the analysis of the structure of the molecules and their dynamics at atomic resolution.

References in corpus (10)

• Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films
• Van der Waals heterostructures
• A Higher-Accuracy van der Waals Density Functional
• Mixed-Dimensional van der Waals Heterostructures
• Van der Waals density functional: an appropriate exchange functional
• Localized atomic basis set in the projector augmented wave method
• Control of Radiation Damage in MoS2 by Graphene Encapsulation
• The pristine atomic structure of MoS2 monolayer protected from electron radiation damage by graphene
• Isotope analysis in the transmission electron microscope
• Diffusive motion of C60 on a graphene sheet

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• Towards Exotic Layered Materials: 2D Cuprous Iodide
• Ionization and electron excitation of fullerene molecules in a carbon nanotube. A variable temperature/voltage transmission electron microscopic study
• The Structure of Graphene on Graphene/C60/Cu Interfaces: A Molecular Dynamics Study
• Ferroelectrics and Photovoltaics in Endohedral Fullerenes-based van der Waals Heterostructures