Nano Electronics on Atomically Controlled van der Waals Quantum Heterostructures
Abstract
We report molecular beam epitaxial growth and electronic transport properties of high quality topological insulator Bi2Se3 thin films on hexagonal boron nitride. We present a comprehensive study on topological insulator (TI) Bi2Se3 thin films on hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN):careful heteroepitaxial growth using molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) and thorough characterizations of their structural and electrical properties. TIs have been spotlighted for their exotic charge and spin transport properties through topologically protected Dirac surface states.Bi2Se3 has in particular attracted an intense attention due to its well-separated topological surface states (TSSs) located in the bulk band gap energy, the largest among the group V2-VI3 TI family. However, experimental efforts on Bi2Se3 have been frequently resulted in the bulk conduction being dominant over TSSs in transport due to bulk doping effects of defect sites. The usual approach to avoid this problem is compensation-doping or alloying. While this approach has been successful in probing the various novel phenomena exhibited by TSSs, it unavoidably results in energy gap smaller than that of pristine Bi2Se3 or an increased degree of disorder, potentially degrading its merits in device applications. On the other hand, high quality TI Bi2Se3 with a reduced concentration of defects can be achieved by the heteroepitaxial growth on a substrate with a compatible lattice structure. h-BN is one of the ideal substrates for Bi2Se3 in this purpose since they share the hexagonal lattice symmetry and dangling-bond-free two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) layered structure.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 19, 2018
- Accession Number
- AD1048239
Entities
People
- Philip Kim
Organizations
- President and Fellows of Harvard College