Growth Mechanism and Enhanced Yield of Black Phosphorus Microribbons

Black phosphorus, a promising two-dimensional material to be widely used in many areas of electronics and optoelectronics, can be prepared traditionally by high pressure or fast low-pressure transport routes. However, there lacks a general understanding of the growth mechanism, and it often suffers from poor yield and high cost. In this paper, we report a facile method to synthesize large-scale black phosphorus microribbons, significantly decreasing its cost and increasing its yield, and then it can commercially produce black phosphorus. The growth process of black phosphorus microribbons has been investigated systematically, and its growth mechanism has been speculated, which opens up the possible opportunity to directly grow black phosphorus microbelts and even few-layered nanobelts by adjusting the growth conditions. In addition, ribbon-like few-layered black phosphorus with large areas can be easily exfoliated from the grown microribbons because of their smooth and large area of the cleavage plane. The ribbon-like few-layered phosphorus is beneficial to investigate the anisotropic properties of black phosphorus.