We report on the controlled growth of h-BN/graphite by means of molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) suggests an interface without any reaction or intermixing, while the angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) measurements show that the h-BN layers are epitaxially aligned with graphite. A well-defined band structure is revealed by ARPES measurement, reflecting the high quality of the h-BN films. The measured valence band maximum (VBM) located at 2.8 eV below the Fermi level reveals the presence of undoped h-BN films (band gap ~ 6 eV). These results demonstrate that, although only weak van der Waals interactions are present between h-BN and graphite, a long range ordering of h-BN can be obtained even on polycrystalline graphite via van der Waals epitaxy, offering the prospect of large area, single layer h-BN.
@article{arxiv.1806.07105,
title = {Van der Waals epitaxy of two-dimensional single-layer h-BN on graphite by molecular beam epitaxy: Electronic properties and band structure},
author = {Debora Pierucci and Jihene Zribi and Hugo Henck and Julien Chaste and Mathieu G. Silly and François Bertran and Patrick Le Fevre and Bernard Gil and Alex Summerfield and Peter H. Beton and Sergei V. Novikov and Guillaume Cassabois and Julien E. Rault and Abdelkarim Ouerghi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.07105},
year = {2018}
}