2D Materials Skip the Energy Barrier by Growing One Row at a Time

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

This row by row process provides clues for the design of 2D materials. Currently, to form certain shapes, designers sometimes need to put systems far out of equilibrium, or balance. That is difficult to control, said De Yoreo.

"But in 1D, the difficulty of getting things to form in an ordered structure goes away," he added. "Then you can operate right near equilibrium and still grow these structures without losing control of the system."

It could change assembly pathways for those engineering microelectronics or even bodily tissues.

Huang's team at UCLA has demonstrated new opportunities for devices based on 2D materials assembled through interactions in solution. But she said the current manual processes used to construct such materials have limitations, including scale-up capabilities.

"Now with the new understanding," said Huang, "we can start to exploit the specific interactions between molecules and 2D materials for automatous assembly processes."

The next step, said De Yoreo, is to make artificial molecules that have the same properties as the peptides studied in the new paper — only more robust.

At PNNL, he and his team are looking at stable peptoids, which are as easy to synthesize as peptides but can better handle the temperatures and chemicals used in the processes to construct the desired materials.

Other study authors are affiliated with PNNL, UW, UCLA, the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. Simulations were performed using the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a Department of Energy Office of Science user facility.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation's Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation: Two-Dimensional Atomic-layer Research and Engineering, or EFRI-2DARE, program.

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