PSE, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
Prof. Xixiang Zhang obtained his PhD degree from the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain, in 1992. After working as a research scientist in Dept. de Fisica Fonamental, Universitat de Barcelona for five years (1992–1997), he joined Hong Kong University of Science and Technology as an assistant professor, and then became a full-time professor in July 2008. In September 2008, he joined King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) as manager of two core labs. He was promoted to director of all core labs in 2012. He became a full-time professor at KAUST in January 2014. His research interests include magnetism, spintronics, nanomaterials, multiferroic materials, two-dimensional (2D) materials and graphene. Based on Web of Science, he has co-authored more than 700 papers that received >36000 non-self-citations with H-index of 89 (Web. of Science). He is a fellow of the American Physical Society.
Two-dimensional (2D) materials have attracted considerable interest in the science community in recent years. Until today, high-quality 2D material films have been grown on metal foils by the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method. However, nanodevice applications usually require 2D material on insulating substrates. To date, growing high-quality 2D layered materials, such as graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), on insulators is still challenging owing to the lack of suitable metal catalysts, imperfect lattice matching with substrates, and other factors. Therefore, developing a generally applicable approach for realizing high-quality 2D layers on insulators remains crucial. We have achieved epitaxial growth of wafer-scale single-crystal graphene at the interface between Cu(111) and Al2O3(0001) by multi-cycle plasma etching-assisted–CVD and carbon diffusion method in our past study. Recently, we have developed a new strategy of universal non-epitaxial synthesis of wafer-scale single-crystal 2D materials on diverse insulating substrates. High-quality 2D-material layers were grown on both surfaces of our single-crystal metal foil, which was pre-placed on an insulating substrate. A brief high-temperature treatment was applied, bringing the foil to an extremely soft near-molten state, which facilitated the adhesion of the metal foil–2D layer onto the insulator surface underneath. Eventually, the 2D material remained on the insulating substrate after cooling and removing the foil. This strategy has been utilized to synthesize large-area single-crystal monolayer, bilayer, and trilayer graphene and hBN on various insulators. This approach is expected to be extended to the future synthesis of other metal-substrate CVD-grown 2D materials and wafer-scale multilayer 2D van der Waals heterostructures on insulating substrates.
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