Sub-Nanometer Interfacial Oxides on Highly Oriented Pyrolytic Graphite and Carbon Nanotubes Enabled by Lateral Oxide Growth.

A new generation of compact and high-speed electronic devices, based on carbon, would be enabled through the development of robust gate oxides with sub-nanometer effective oxide thickness (EOT) on carbon nanotubes or graphene nanoribbons. However, to date, the lack of dangling bonds on sp oriented graphene sheets has limited the high precursor nucleation density enabling atomic layer deposition of sub-1 nm EOT gate oxides. It is shown here that by deploying a low-temperature AlO (LT AlO) process, involving atomic layer deposition (ALD) of AlO at 50 °C with a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) component, a high nucleation density layer can be formed, which templates the growth of a high- dielectric, such as HfO.