Superlubricity enabled dry transfer of non-encapsulated graphene

Transferring high-quality exfoliated graphene flakes onto different substrates while keeping the graphene free of polymer residues is of great importance, but at the same time very challenging. Currently, the only feasible way is the so-called all-dry “pick-and-lift” method, in which a hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) flake is employed to serve as a stamp to pick up graphene from one substrate and to lift it down onto another substrate. The transferred graphene samples, however, are always covered or encapsulated by hBN flakes, which leads to difficulties in further characterizations. Here, we report an improved “pick-and-lift” method, which allows ultra-clean graphene flakes to be transferred onto a variety of substrates without hBN coverage. Basically, by exploiting the superlubricity at the graphene/hBN stack interface, we are able to remove the top-layer hBN stamp by applying a tangential force and expose the underneath graphene.