Van der Waals epitaxy for highly lattice-mismatched systems

One of the major obstacles to realize various kinds of heterostructures is the lattice matching between constituent materials. This difficulty has been proved to be overcome if one uses the interface having van der Waals nature, This kind of interface can be formed when a layered material is grown on a cleaved face of another layered material. Moreover, it has been found that these heterostructures can be grown on a three-dimensional material substrate such as Si or GaAs, if the dangling bond on its surface is terminated by proper atoms. This idea has also been successfully applied to grow epitaxial films of organic molecular crystals such as metal phthalocyanines and fullerenes. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.