Speaker
Description
Understanding the chemical reactivity of 2D materials such as graphene and hexagonal-boron nitride (h-BN) is of fundamental importance for obtaining flexible and tunable materials for devices and electronic applications, as well as for fundamental science to obtain concepts for the chemistry on such materials. The interaction of graphene and h-BN with oxygen and atomic hydrogen will be discussed in details and the results for the two substrates will be compared. While in the case of atomic hydrogen, graphene forms graphone, i.e. fully hydrogenated graphene, for h-BN hydrogen can bond and intercalate, depending on the exposure. Interestingly, graphene does not react with molecular oxygen, even when supplied with a high kinetic energy of 0.7 eV, while h-BN readily forms bonds to oxygen, intercalates or even reacts, depending on the substrate temperature. Further insights to the bonding and reaction mechanisms of hydrogen and oxygen are obtained from DFT calculations.
