Invited Paper 2D+EM+NS+PS+SP+SS+TF-MoM5
Controlled Interfaces in 2D Materials

Monday, October 19, 2015, 9:40 am, Room 212C

Interfaces are ubiquitous in material science and technologies. For example, grain boundaries often dominate the mechanical and electrical properties in crystalline materials, while interfaces between dissimilar materials form the fundamental building blocks to diverse technologies, such as building electrical contacts in transistors and PN diodes in solar cells. Interfaces become even more important in 2D materials such as graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides, where the lack of dangling bonds enables material stability down to a single monolayer. In this entirely surface-dominated limit, the usual rules governing 3D interface devices, such as depletion regions, break down.

In this talk, we will discuss our work on engineering in- and out-of-plane 2D materials interfaces. We will first examine the structure of atomically-thin membranes and the impact of defects such as grain boundaries on the mechanical, optical, and electronic properties. We fabricate out-of-plane interfaces by stacking 2D materials to form heterostructures, which we utilize to tailor the bandgap in 2D materials and build new optoelectronic devices such as tunable photodiodes. Looking to the future, the rapidly expanding family of 2D materials with a diverse set of electronic properties provide a promising palette for discovering emergent phenomena and a motivation for developing overarching design principles for understanding and controlling interfaces in 2D.