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Major breakthrough in nature: Self-assembly engineering—controllable layer-by-layer stacking of two-dimensional materials
Release time:
2022/05/30
Precisely designing high-performance semiconductor thin films with vertical structures at the atomic scale holds great promise for research into modern integrated circuits and novel materials. One approach to obtaining such thin films is to achieve continuous, layer-by-layer self-assembly—where two-dimensional building blocks are stacked in the vertical direction and held together by van der Waals forces. Graphene and transition-metal dichalcogenides, which are only one or three atoms thick, have already been employed to fabricate some heterojunctions that were previously challenging to prepare, demonstrating remarkably superior physical properties. However, no scalable self-assembly method has yet been developed that can simultaneously preserve the intrinsic properties of two-dimensional materials and create well-defined interfacial layers. This limitation persists.
Precisely designing high-performance semiconductor thin films with vertical structures at the atomic scale holds great promise for the development of modern integrated circuits and novel materials. One approach to obtaining such thin films is to achieve continuous, layer-by-layer self-assembly—where two-dimensional building blocks are stacked in the vertical direction and held together by van der Waals forces. Graphene and transition-metal dichalcogenides, which are only one or three atoms thick, have already been employed to fabricate some heterojunctions that were previously challenging to prepare, and they exhibit remarkably superior physical properties. However, no scalable self-assembly method has yet been developed that can simultaneously preserve the intrinsic properties of two-dimensional materials and create well-defined interfacial layers. This limitation has hindered the transition of the layer-by-layer self-assembly approach toward large-scale, nanoscale fabrication.
[Summary of Achievements]
Jiwoong Park of Cornell University (corresponding author) and colleagues have reported a method for fabricating semiconductor thin films at the wafer scale with high spatial uniformity and intrinsic interfacial quality. The related research paper, titled “Layer-by-layer assembly of two-dimensional materials into wafer-scale heterostructures,” was published online on September 21, 2017, in Nature, one of the world’s leading scientific journals. The vertical compositional structure of these thin films is achieved through atomic-scale self-assembly of two-dimensional material building blocks under vacuum conditions. Meanwhile, several large-scale, high-quality heterostructure thin films and devices have been fabricated, including superlattice films, batch-produced arrays of tunable resistance tunnel junctions, bandgap-engineered heterojunction tunnel diodes, and millimeter-scale ultrathin films. The stacked films are detachable, can be interrupted during fabrication, and are compatible with interfaces such as water and plastics, enabling seamless integration with other optical and mechanical systems.
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