  There is great interest in the study of topological insulator-based
heterostructures due to expected emerging phenomena. However, a challenge of
topological insulator (TI) research is the contribution of the bulk conduction
to the TI surface states. Both strain engineering and thickness control routes,
which have been proposed to compensate for bulk doping, can be accessed through
the use of nano-heterostructures consisting of topological insulator
nanostructures grown on 2D materials. In this work, we report the synthesis of
TI/graphene nano-heterostructures based on Bi2Te3 and Sb2Te3 nanoplatelets
(NPs) grown on single-layer graphene. Various techniques were used to
characterize this system in terms of morphology, thickness, composition, and
crystal quality. We found that most of the obtained NPs are mainly < 20 [nm]
thick with thickness-dependent crystal quality, observed by Raman measurements.
Thinner NPs (1 or 2 QL) tend to replicate the topography of the underlying SLG,
according to roughness analysis, and observed buckling features. Finally, we
show preliminary studies of their band structure obtained by LT-STM (STS) and
by DFT. We observe a highly negative doping which can be attributed to the
presence of defects.
