Electron-Beam Manipulation of Silicon Dopants in Graphene

Abstract

The direct manipulation of individual atoms in materials using scanning probe microscopy has been a seminal achievement of nanotechnology. Recent advances in imaging resolution and sample stability have made scanning transmission electron microscopy a promising alternative for single-atom manipulation of covalently bound materials. Pioneering experiments using an atomically focused electron beam have demonstrated the directed movement of silicon atoms over a handful of sites within the graphene lattice. Here, we achieve a much greater degree of control, allowing us to precisely move silicon impurities along an extended path, circulating a single hexagon, or back and forth between the two graphene sublattices. Even with manual operation, our manipulation rate is already comparable to the state-of-the-art in any atomically precise technique. We further explore the influence of electron energy on the manipulation rate, supported by improved theoretical modeling taking into account the vibrations of atoms near the impurities, and implement feedback to detect manipulation events in real time. In addition to atomic-level engineering of its structure and properties, graphene also provides an excellent platform for refining the accuracy of quantitative models and for the development of automated manipulation.

5 figures, 4 supporting figures

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Cited by in corpus (25)

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• Exploring order parameters and dynamic processes in disordered systems via variational autoencoders
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• Defect-Dependent Corrugation in Graphene
• Engineered electronic states in atomically precise artificial lattices and graphene nanoribbons
• Electron-beam Introduction of Heteroatomic Pt-Si Structures in Graphene
• Doping of Cr in Graphene Using Electron Beam Manipulation for Functional Defect Engineering
• Graphene Lattices with Embedded Transition-Metal Atoms and Tunable Magnetic Anisotropy Energy: Implications for Spintronic Devices
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• Direct-Writing Atom-by-Atom
• Aligned Stacking of Nanopatterned 2D materials -- Towards 3D printing at atomic resolution
• Mechanism of electron-beam manipulation of single dopant atoms in silicon
• Direct visualization of the 3D structure of silicon impurities in graphene
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• Top-down fabrication of atomic patterns in twisted bilayer graphene
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• Three-dimensional description of vibration-assisted electron knock-on damage
• Electron-beam induced emergence of mesoscopic ordering in layered MnPS${}_3$
• Exploring Electron Beam Induced Atomic Assembly via Reinforcement Learning in a Molecular Dynamics Environment
• Quantitative electron beam-single atom interactions enabled by sub-20-pm precision targeting
• Van der Waals Epitaxy on Freestanding Monolayer Graphene Membrane by MBE
• Unsupervised Machine Learning Discovery of Chemical and Physical Transformation Pathways from Imaging Data
• Single indium atoms and few-atom indium clusters anchored onto graphene via silicon heteroatoms
• Numerical package for QFT calculations of defect-induced phenomena in graphene