Hexagonal boron nitride film substrate for fabrication of nanostructures

The fabrication of material with an atomic scale manipulation requires the suitable advanced substrate for epitaxial growth without the effect by the substrate lattice structure. Hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) can be the adva nced substrate for atomic manipulation due to van der Waals' gap with littl e attractive force along to c axis. We have successfully synthesized h-BN l ayer on the co-deposited Cu/BN film by surface segregation phenomena using helicon wave plasma enhanced radio frequency (rf) magnetron sputtering syst em. Auger electron spectroscopy (AES) and X-ray photon spectroscopy (XPS) a nalysis showed that the h-BN composite segregated on the surface of Cu/BN f ilm covered over 95% of the film annealed at 900 K for 30 min. Atomic force s microscopy (AFM) and scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) analysis showed that attractive force on the film surface is uniformly distributed to an ex tent of 2nN and that the h-BN surface can be a good electric insulator like sintered h-BN plate, (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.