ARTIMATTER · Lego-Style Materials, Structures and Devices Assembled on Demand from Isolated Atomic Planes""

Following the advent of graphene with its wide range of unique properties, several other one-atom-thick crystals have been isolated and their preliminary studies have been undertaken. They range from semiconducting monolayers of MoS2 and NbSe2, which similar to graphene exhibit the electric field effect and relatively high electronic quality, to wide-gap insulators such as boron-nitride monolayers that can serve as atomically-thin tunnel barriers.This library of two-dimensional crystals opens a possibility to construct various 3D structures with on-demand properties, which do not exist in nature but can be assembled in Lego style by stacking individual atomic planes on top of each other in a desired sequence. This project is to explore this new avenue.We will design, fabricate and study multilayer materials ranging from basic heterostructures that consist of a few alternating layers of graphene and boron nitride and already exhibit a rich spectrum of new phenomena, as recently demonstrated by the applicant’s group, to complex artificial materials containing many layers of different 2D crystals and mimicking, for example, layered superconductors. In a similar manner, various electronic, optoelectronic, micromechanical and other devices will be developed and investigated. The applicant’s aim is to search for new materials with unique properties, novel devices with better characteristics and new physics that is likely to emerge along the way.The proposed research offers many exciting opportunities and can lead to the development of a large unexplored field with impact exceeding even that of graphene research. This presents a unique, once-in-decade, opportunity to make a very significant breakthrough in condensed matter physics and materials science.""