Nanoscale investigations of soft breakdown events in few layered fluorinated graphene

In this study, we perform scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) on bi/tri-layered fluorinated graphene (FG) dielectrics, enabling investigation of the degradation and the breakdown phenomenon at the sub-nanometer scale. Our characterization results show that the energy gap can be tailored by surface functionalization of graphene with fluorine ions. Experimental evidence of electrical stress induced degradation and breakdown trends at localized spots across bi/tri-layered FG films is presented. Statistical analysis on bi-layered FG film breakdown voltage data reveals a tri-modal Weibull distribution trend possibly due to variations in the effective FG thickness due to imperfect fluorine incorporation at all C-sites during the fluorine diffusion process. Although preliminary, the results presented provide insight into the kinetics of degradation in graphene based 2-D dielectric materials.