2D materials: introduction and market status - Page 1

A team of scientists at Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. has designed a mass-production strategy to create monolayer graphene-based reversible self-folding structures. The material may find potential uses in microfluidics and micromechanical systems.

Mechanism and versatility of self‐folding SU8 films. Image from article

As proof of concept, the team achieved complex and functional devices in the form of rings, polyhedra, flowers and origami birds. They then integrated gold electrodes to the constructs to improve their detection sensitivity. The experiments suggest a comprehensive framework to rationally design and fabricate scalable and complex, 3D, self-folding optical and electronic devices by folding 2D monolayer graphene.

Researchers at Chalmers University in Sweden have recently reported a facile and controllable anisotropic wet etching method that allows scalable fabrication of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD) metamaterials with atomic precision. The team says that this new method has great potential for various layered structures like MoS₂ and WS₂ and graphene.

Process of etching hexagonal nanostructures in TMD materials. Image from article

They showed that materials can be etched along certain crystallographic axes, such that the obtained edges are nearly atomically sharp and exclusively zigzag-terminated. This results in hexagonal nanostructures of predefined order and complexity, including few-nanometer-thin nanoribbons and nanojunctions. Thus, this method enables future studies of a broad range of metamaterials through atomically precise control of the structure.