Universal 2D material film transfer using a novel low molecular weight polyvinyl acetate

Abstract Polyvinyl acetate (PVAc) is used as a rigid support layer during transfer process of large area chemical vapor deposition (CVD)-grown two-dimensional (2D) materials onto desirable target substrates without incorporating structural and chemical damages. The PVAc as a support layer provides key advantages suitable for transfer of high-quality large-area 2D materials, such as an excellent room-temperature solubility in chemical solvents (including acetone, methanol, and ethanol), a robust support, and low-cost. To demonstrate that our PVAc assisted transfer method exhibits a reliable performance, we measured 100 devices employing graphene transferred by each polymer medium. The PVAc assisted transfer technique enables graphene to achieve a high carrier mobility of up to ~ 10,000 cm2 V−1 s−1 at room temperature having smaller standard deviation compared to those of the graphene transferred via other transfer methods, indicating that the quality of the as-transferred 2D materials is not only mainly determined by the quality of the as-synthesized 2D materials, but also by defects incurred during the transfer process. Our novel transfer technique will enable application studies of 2D materials to large area electronic and optoelectronic devices.