Reliable post-processing improvement of van der Waals heterostructures.

The successful assembly of heterostructures consisting of several layers of different 2D materials in arbitrary order by exploiting van der Waals forces has truly been a game changer in the field of low dimensional physics. For instance, the encapsulation of graphene or MoS2 between atomically flat hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) layers with strong affinity and graphitic gates that screen charge impurity disorder provided access to a plethora of new physical phenomena by drastically boosting the device quality. The encapsulation is accompanied by a self-cleansing effect at the interfaces. The otherwise predominant charged impurity disorder is minimized and random strain fluctuations ultimately constitute the main source of residual disorder. Despite these advances, the fabricated heterostructures still vary notably in their performance and many possess only mediocre quality. Here, we report a reliable method to improve fully completed van der Waals heterostructure devices with a straightforward post-processing surface treatment based on contact mode AFM. The impact is demonstrated by comparing magnetotransport measurements before and after the AFM treatment on one and the same device as well as on a larger set of treated and untreated devices to collect device statistics. Both the low temperature properties as well as the room temperature electrical characteristics as relevant for applications improve on average substantially. We surmise that the main beneficial effect arises from reducing nanometer scale corrugations at the interfaces and, hence, the detrimental impact of random strain fluctuations due to the AFM ironing action.