Controlled Electrochemical Intercalation of Graphene/h-BN van der Waals Heterostructures

Abstract

Electrochemical intercalation is a powerful method for tuning the electronic properties of layered solids. In this work, we report an electro-chemical strategy to controllably intercalate lithium ions into a series of van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures built by sandwiching graphene between hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN). We demonstrate that encapsulating graphene with h-BN eliminates parasitic surface side reactions while simultaneously creating a new hetero-interface that permits intercalation between the atomically thin layers. To monitor the electrochemical process, we employ the Hall effect to precisely monitor the intercalation reaction. We also simultaneously probe the spectroscopic and electrical transport properties of the resulting intercalation compounds at different stages of intercalation. We achieve the highest carrier density $>5\times 10^{13}c{m}^{-2}$ with mobility $>10^{3}c{m}^2/(Vs)$ in the most heavily intercalated samples, where Shubnikov-de Haas quantum oscillations are observed at low temperatures. These results set the stage for further studies that employ intercalation in modifying properties of vdW heterostructures.

References in corpus (10)

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• Superconductivity in the Intercalated Graphite Compounds C6Yb and C6Ca
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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Gate-tunable Room-temperature Ferromagnetism in Two-dimensional Fe${}_3$GeTe${}_2$
• Multispectral Electro-Optical Surfaces: from Visible to Microwave
• Proton and Li-Ion Permeation through Graphene with Eight-Atom-Ring Defects
• Heterointerface effects on lithium-induced phase transitions in intercalated MoS2
• Electronic Transport of Two-Dimensional Ultrawide Bandgap Material h-BeO
• Prediction of novel two-dimensional rare-earth material with room-temperature ferromagnetism and large perpendicular magnetic anisotropy
• Heterointerface control over lithium-induced phase transitions in MoS2 heterostructures
• In-plane staging in lithium-ion intercalation of bilayer graphene
• Heterointerface effects in the electro-intercalation of van der Waals heterostructures
• Galvanic intercalation of molecular cations into van der Waals materials