Metal-assisted exfoliation of two-dimensional (2D) materials has emerged as an efficient route to isolating large-area monolayer crystals, yet the influence of the supporting metal substrate on their intrinsic properties remains poorly understood. Here, we demonstrate successful gold-assisted exfoliation of monolayer IrTe2 up to the millimeter scale. Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), combined with first-principles calculations, reveals that the low-energy electronic structure closely resembles that of a freestanding monolayer 1T-IrTe2. We find that quasi-covalent hybridization together with substrate-induced strain leads to only modest modifications of the electronic bands. Although strain contributes to phase stability, it is essentially hybridization that drives the stabilization of the 1T-phase of the monolayer IrTe2 by suppressing stripe-ordered phase transitions. These results establish gold-assisted exfoliation as a robust route to prepare a large-area monolayer IrTe2 and highlight the role of metal-substrate interaction in engineering 2D materials with tailored structural phases.
@article{arxiv.2512.05616,
title = {Suppression of stripe-ordered structural phases in monolayer IrTe$_2$ by a gold substrate},
author = {Kati Asikainen and Frédéric Chassot and Baptiste Hildebrand and Aymen Mahmoudi and Joel Morf and Mahault Berset and Pascal Turban and Matti Alatalo and S. Assa Aravindh and Marko Huttula and KeYuan Ma and Fabian O. von Rohr and Jean-Christophe Le Breton and Thomas Jaouen and Claude Monney},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.05616},
year = {2025}
}