The pursuit of materials platforms for advanced electronics technology demands methods for high-throughput materials synthesis and subsequent characterization. Novel materials of interest in this pursuit may be produced in bulk by direct reaction synthesis1,2, electrochemical growth3,4, and other methods5 in a more rapid fashion than more involved single crystal thin film deposition techniques such as molecular beam epitaxy or chemical vapor deposition. The conventional method to measure the transport properties of bulk crystal samples is to cleave a rectangular prism-shaped fragment with dimensions of approximately 1 mm x 1 mm x 6 mm and attach wire leads to the sample in a Hall bar configuration6.
Certain materials pose a challenge wherein the traditional bulk Hall bar device fabrication method is insufficient to produce a measureable device for sample transport measurement. This can be because the crystals produced are too small to attach lead wires to, even under a powerful optical microscope, because the desired sample thickness is on the order of one to only a few monolayers, or because one aims to measure a stack of layered two-dimensional materials with near- or sub-nanometer thickness. The first category consists of, for example nanowires and certain preparations of molybdenum oxide bronzes7. The second category consists of single to very-few layers of two-dimensional materials such as graphene8, TMDs (MoS2, WTe2, etc.), and topological insulators (Bi2Se3, BixSb1-xTe3, etc.). The third category consists of heterostructures prepared by stacking individual layers of two-dimensional materials by manual assembly via layer transfer, most notably a trilayer stack of hBN-graphene-hBN9.
Exploratory research of novel electronic materials demands adequate methods for producing devices on difficult-to-measure samples. Often, the first batch of a new material synthesized by direct reaction or electrochemical growth yields very small single crystals with dimensions on the size order of microns. Such samples have historically proven enormously difficult to attach metal contacts to, necessitating improvement of sample growth parameters to achieve larger crystals for easier transport device fabrication, presenting an obstacle in the high-throughput research of novel materials. In order to enable rapid characterization of materials, a method of device fabrication for very small samples has been devised to permit the characterization of novel materials as soon as a preliminary batch has been produced. A slight variation of this methodology is applicable to producing devices using exfoliated samples of two-dimensional materials such as graphene, hBN, and TMDs, as well as multilayer heterostructures of such materials. Devices are adhered and wire-bonded to a package for insertion into a commercial superconducting magnet, dry helium close-cycle cryostat magnetotransport system. Transport measurements are taken at temperatures down to 0.300 K and magnetic fields up to 12 T.