Exciting electronic characteristics emerge when scientists stack 2D materials on top of each other and give the top layer a little twist.
The twist turns a normal material into a patterned lattice and changes the quantum behavior of the material. These twisted materials have shown superconductivity—where a material can conduct electricity without energy loss—as well as special quantum effects. Researchers hope these "twistronics" could become components in future quantum devices.
But creating these extremely thin stacked structures, called moiré superlattices, is difficult to do. Scientists usually peel off single layers of material using Scotch tape and then carefully stick those layers together. However, the method has a very low success rate, often leaves behind contamination between layers and produces tiny samples smaller than the width of a human hair.
These samples are extremely hard to reproduce, and it's nearly impossible to scale them up to real devices, which limits the kinds of experiments researchers can perform to uncover the strange quantum behaviors inside.
Now, Stanford University Chemistry Professor Fang Liu has developed a new way to create these lattices that is cleaner and scalable to millimeters and centimeters in size with nearly perfect yield. To show the potential properties of her materials, Liu worked with researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
The team published their results in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
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