Two technical breakthroughs make high-quality 2D materials possible

Researchers are looking to replace silicon in electronics with materials that offer higher performance and lower power consumption and are scalable. An international team is addressing that need by developing a promising process for developing high-quality 2D materials that could power next-generation electronics.

Sang-Hoon Bae, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and material science at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, was one of three researchers leading the multi-institutional work published on January 18, Naturewith doctoral student Justin S. Kim and postdoctoral research associate Yuan Meng.

The work, which includes two technical breakthroughs, is the first to report that their method for developing Semiconductor materialsknown as transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD), will make the device faster and use less power.

The research team is led by Jeehwan Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Jin-Hong Park, professor of information and communication engineering and of electrons and electrical engineering at Sungkyunkwan University, had to overcome three extremely difficult challenges to create the new material: ensuring single crystallinity at the wafer scale; prevent uneven thickness during wafer-scale growth; and wafer-scale vertical heterostructures.

Bae says the 3D material undergoes roughening and smoothing to become a material with a flat surface. However, 2D materials do not allow this process, resulting in uneven surfaces, making it difficult to have high-quality, large-scale, uniform 2D materials.

“We designed a geometrically limited structure that facilitates the control of the 2D material’s kinetics so that any major challenges in the growth of high-quality 2D materials can be solved,” says Bae. to handle”. “Thanks to the facilitated kinetic control, we only need to seed self-determining in a shorter development time.”

The team made another technical breakthrough by demonstrating single-domain heterojunction TMDs at the thin slice or large scale by layer-by-layer growth. To limit nuclear growth, they used various substrates made of chemical compounds. These substrates form a physical barrier that prevented the formation of lateral epithelium and forced vertical growth.

“We believe that our limited growth technique can bring all the amazing discoveries in the physics of 2D materials to the commercial level by allowing the construction of individual heterojunctions,” said Bae. single-domain layer at wafer scale”.

Bae said other researchers are studying the material at very small sizes ranging from tens to hundreds of micrometers.

“We scaled up because we could solve the problem by producing high-quality materials on a large scale,” says Bae. “Our achievement will lay a solid foundation for 2D materials suitable for industrial environments.”