Environmental instability of few-layer black phosphorus

By J. Island, G. Steele, Herre S. J. van der Zant, A. Castellanos-Gómez. 2014

917 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the environmental instability of mechanically exfoliated few-layer black phosphorus (BP). From continuous measurements of flake topography over several days, we observe an increase of over 200% in volume due to the condensation of moisture from air. We find that long term exposure to ambient conditions results in a layer-by-layer etching process of BP flakes. Interestingly, flakes can be etched down to single layer (phosphorene) thicknesses. BPʼs strong affinity for water greatly modifies the performance of fabricated field-effect transistors (FETs) measured in ambient conditions. Upon exposure to air, we differentiate between two timescales for changes in BP FET transfer characteristics: a short timescale (minutes) in which a shift in the threshold voltage occurs due to physisorbed oxygen and nitrogen, and a long timescale (hours) in which strong p-type doping occurs from water absorption. Continuous measurements of BP FETs in air reveal eventual degradation and break-down of the channel material after several days due to the layer-by-layer etching process.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/12d204f2c70977bff68fcc8b983d26824cb9f5a1

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In Biomedical Engineering

1. G. Xie
2. Tony Low
3. Volker J. Sorger
4. D. van Thourhout
5. Jianbin Luo

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. G. Xie
2. Tony Low
3. Volker J. Sorger
4. Wei Wang
5. D. van Thourhout
6. Jianbin Luo
7. Wim Bogaerts
8. R. Baets

In Materials Chemistry

1. Tony Low
2. Wei Wang
3. D. van Thourhout
4. Jianbin Luo
5. G. Xie

Citations in the corpus

• Black phosphorus as a new lubricant (2018, background): “However, long-term exposure to ambient conditions leads to a layer-by-layer etching process; consequently, the swollen sample shrinks and even reduces to the single-layer thickness [72].”
• Strain-engineered high-responsivity MoTe2 photodetector for silicon photonic integrated circuits (2019, background): “However, the low stability under ambient conditions, limits its application [28].”