| dc.description.abstract | Antimonene is an emerging two-dimensional semiconductor material that is buckled honeycomb structure, wide bandgap 2.28 eV, and 1329 cm2/Vs carrier mobility. Compared to well-studied 2D materials such as InSe2 or phosphorene, antimonene has higher chemical stability under the atmosphere. Therefore, it is regarded as one of the next-generation electronics materials. However, the bottle-neck of antimonene is out of a proper method to produce high-quality antimonene. Nowadays, the frequently-used method is liquid-phase exfoliation; however, the as-prepared antimonene can only have around hundreds of nanometers to a few micrometers thick or less than tens nanometer in lateral size, thus limits the practical application of of antimonene .
Herein, we provide an improved liquid-phase exfoliation by quenching antimony powder in advance. During the quenching process, the surface of the antimony powder not only flattens but also declines the thickness due to the high temperature. Moreover, this process also plays a main role to assist the reduction of the thickness and increasing the production yield of exfoliated antimonene flakes.
As a result, atomic force microscopy (AFM) analysis shows the average flake size is 63.4 nm, and the average thickness is 1.46 nm; besides, the statistical analysis provides the evidence that this method allows to produce the high-uniformity in lateral size of antimonene. The optical band gap, analyzed by ultraviolet-visible spectrophotometry, is 2.79 eV, and the yield of antimonene is 36.1%. Finally, the X-ray diffraction (XRD) results indicate that the antimonene film can easily exfoliate along the (012) plane. This method provides a high-efficiency, cost-effective, and mass-production method for high-quality antimonene. | en_US |