Functionalization of 2D materials by intercalation

Since the discovery of graphene many studies focused on its functionalization by different methods. These strategies aim to find new pathways to overcome the main drawback of graphene, a missing band-gap, which strongly reduces its potential applications, particularly in the domain of nanoelectronics, despite its huge and unequaled charge carrier mobility. The necessity to contact this material with a metal has motivated a lot of studies of metal/graphene interactions and has led to the discovery of the intercalation process very early in the history of graphene. Intercalation, where the deposited atoms do not stay at the graphene surface but intercalate between the top layer and the substrate, may happen at room temperature or be induced by annealing, depending of the chemical nature of the metal. This kind of mechanism was already well-known in the earlier Graphite Intercalation Compounds (GICs), particularly famous for one current application, the Lithium-ion Battery, which is simply an application based on the intercalation of Lithium atoms between two sheets of graphene in a graphite anode. Among numerous discoveries the GICs community also found a way to obtain graphite with superconducting properties by using intercalated alkali metals. Graphene is now a playground to “revisit” and understand all these mechanisms and to discover possible new properties of graphene induced by intercalation. For example, the intercalation process may be used to decouple the graphene layer from its substrate, to change its doping level or even, in a more general way, to modify its electronic band structure and the nature of its Dirac fermions. In this paper we will focus on the functionalization of graphene by using intercalation of metal atoms but also of molecules. We will give an overview of the induced modifications of the electronic band structure possibly leading to spin-orbit coupling, superconductivity, …We will see how this concept of functionalization is also now used in the framework of other 2D materials beyond graphene and of van der Waals heterostructures based on these materials.