Straintronics with van der Waals materials

Note: Mechanical in situ exfoliation of van der Waals materials.

Exfoliation, namely, the peeling of layered materials down to a single unit-cell thin foil, opens promising avenues to fabricate novel electronic materials. New properties and original functionalities emerge in the single and few layer configurations of a number of layered compounds, in particular in transition metal dichalcogenides. However, many of these thin exfoliated materials are very sen...

Aqueous gating of van der Waals materials on bilayer nanopaper.

In this work, we report transistors made of van der Waals materials on a mesoporous paper with a smooth nanoscale surface. The aqueous transistor has a novel planar structure with source, drain, and gate electrodes on the same surface of the paper, while the mesoporous paper is used as an electrolyte reservoir. These transistors are enabled by an all-cellulose paper with nanofibrillated cellulo...

Scaling laws for van der Waals interactions in nanostructured materials

Van der Waals interactions have a fundamental role in biology, physics and chemistry, in particular in the self-assembly and the ensuing function of nanostructured materials. Here we utilize an efficient microscopic method to demonstrate that van der Waals interactions in nanomaterials act at distances greater than typically assumed, and can be characterized by different scaling laws depending ...

Van der Waals interactions in advanced materials , in memory of

Van der Waals interactions with soft interfaces

Many naturally occurring microbiological and synthetic polymer systems have soft interfaces due, e.g., to the presence of polymer brushes at the surfaces. The initial interactions (before contact) in such systems are typically physical rather than chemical in origin, e.g. electrostatic or van der Waals forces. We calculate the form of the summed van der Waals interaction energies UHS and USS be...