Abstract (eng)
Since the discovery of atomically thin graphene, low-dimensional materials are making rapid progress for their use in future technology due to their exceptional intrinsic properties. Atomically thin nature of materials allows us to extrinsically introduce atomic scale modifications, hence manipulate the properties for particular application. The external manipulation processes are also important for optimizing the materials sustainability in device operations. There is a broad range of methods to externally modify materials, for example, the application of electric field, high temperatures, gaseous and liquid environment, electron, and particle irradiation etc. The high-end electron microscopes with Angstrom-level resolution and customized with tools made it possible to study the atomic structure of materials and test them under various environments which provide insights into structural dynamics and transformation of materials. This thesis presents the structural modifications in 1D (carbon nanotubes), 2D (graphene, MoS2) and their stacked systems under external stimuli such as electric biasing, plasma, and highly charged ion irradiation by employing scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM).
In this thesis, I modified the target materials using various methods and performed in situ and ex situ experiments for observing the structural dynamics and evolution. Firstly, we used Ar plasma irradiation method to substitute heteroatoms (Si) in both graphene and SWCNTs lattices. The results reveal that the Si atoms are found in 3-fold and 4-fold configurations in SWCNTs. Secondly, we studied the effect of highly charged ions on graphene-MoS2 heterostructrues. The results show that irradiation leads to the creation of nanosize pores in MoS2, while graphene lattice remains intact. In an experiment, when sample is irradiated on graphene side, both lattices remain unaffected. Finally, we performed in situ Joule-heating experiments on graphene and graphene-MoS2 heterostructrues. The results exhibit dynamics, and evaporation of contaminants on graphene lattice while the temperature reaches up to 2000~K and beyond depending on device geometry. In the case of a heterostructure, at a bias of 3~V over the suspended sample, we observed the gradual transformation of 2D MoS2 into 3D nanocrystals followed by processes such as vacancy formation, void expansion, and edge evaporation.
In summary, this work explored the different methods to structurally modify the multidimensional heterostructures (1D/2D and 2D/2D) and could be extended to entire range of low-dimensional materials and their stack combinations to get insights into growth, dynamics and evolution of materials and establish new nanofabrication technique.