Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed a new method for producing atomically-thin semiconducting crystals that could one day enable more powerful and compact electronic devices.
By using specially-treated silicon surfaces to tailor the crystals’ size and shape, the team has found a potentially faster and less expensive way to produce next-generation semiconductor crystals for microchips. The crystalline materials produced this way could accelerate technological developments in quantum computing and higher efficiency solar cells and batteries. Directed crystal growth on designer substrates has the potential to enable the preparation of low-dimensional materials with prescribed morphologies and tunable or emergent optoelectronic properties.
The findings are described in a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology.