Electron-beam assisted growth of hexagonal boron-nitride layer

It has been known that a good quality h-BN layer can only be grown within a narrow temperature window of 1020-1100 K on a copper substrate. We found that the growth temperature window on Cu(111) surface could be lowered up to 100 K by ionizing and/or exciting borazine precursor gas with an electron-beam. The structures of a hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) layers grown at various substrate temperatures on a Cu(111) were examined using scanning tunneling microscopy. We found that the grown h-BN film exhibits highly inert behavior with wide bandgap semiconductor characteristics.