Achievement

IGERT Fellow Brian Calderon has developed a new, potentially industrially integrable technique for the large-area growth of hexagonal boron nitride nanosheets (hBNNS) which uses chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on polycrystalline Ni foil. Boron nitride is a two-dimensional insulator that, in its hexagonal form, has similar lattice structure to graphene and very little lattice mismatch (~1.7%). In order to exploit all of the marvelous electronic properties of graphene and other two-dimensional materials, a defect-free and atomically-smooth substrate such as hBNNS is needed. This new growth technique may enable the demonstration development of two-dimensional solar cells with enhanced properties.