Liquid exfoliation of solvent-stabilized few-layer black phosphorus for applications beyond electronics

By D. Hanlon, C. Backes, Evie Doherty, C. Cucinotta, N. Berner, Conor S. Boland, Kangho Lee, Andrew Harvey, Peter J. Lynch, Z. Gholamvand and 16 more. Nature Communications, 2015

992 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Few-layer black phosphorus (BP) is a new two-dimensional material which is of great interest for applications, mainly in electronics. However, its lack of environmental stability severely limits its synthesis and processing. Here we demonstrate that high-quality, few-layer BP nanosheets, with controllable size and observable photoluminescence, can be produced in large quantities by liquid phase exfoliation under ambient conditions in solvents such as N-cyclohexyl-2-pyrrolidone (CHP). Nanosheets are surprisingly stable in CHP, probably due to the solvation shell protecting the nanosheets from reacting with water or oxygen. Experiments, supported by simulations, show reactions to occur only at the nanosheet edge, with the rate and extent of the reaction dependent on the water/oxygen content. We demonstrate that liquid-exfoliated BP nanosheets are potentially useful in a range of applications from ultrafast saturable absorbers to gas sensors to fillers for composite reinforcement. While phosphorene is an exciting new 2D material, techniques to produce it in large quantities in a stable, processable form are lacking. Here, the authors achieve this using liquid phase exfoliation and demonstrate the resultant nanosheets to be useful in a number of applications.

Subfields: Materials Chemistry, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a2a150846b34b085d34f8ac8fcd3407dedbae40a

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Citations in the corpus

The rising star of 2D black phosphorus beyond graphene: synthesis, properties and electronic applications (2017, methodology): “However, Hanlon et al made the breakthrough to fabricate high quality and stable phosphorene in the atmospheric environment by a solution stripping method using N-cyclohexyl2-pyrrolidone [49].”
Degradation of phosphorene in air: understanding at atomic level (2015, background): “bothO2 andH2O, the degradation process slows down with the exposure of phosphorene to only O2 or H2O [15, 35]; experiments have shown a drop of pH after water addition to phosphorene [13], which is a clear”