Unlocking Nano-Scale Electronics with New Monolayer Material

Complete present day electronics industry has been striving hard to squeeze dimensions of components without affecting their performance and efficiency. A team of researchers, working at the New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, discovered a new process of electronics development at atomic scale. For now, these are the smallest dimensions that can be assigned to a component. Previously, different teams did try to develop electronics with two-dimensional or the monolayer electronic materials (such as graphene) to formulate transistors, but could not register success in wake of energy band gap dearth making semiconductor applications more difficult.

A new research led by Davood Shahrjerdi, an assistant professor of computer and electrical engineering, demonstrated that tungsten disulfide monolayer might be the answer we were looking for in this case. He explains, “You can’t turn off the graphene transistors.” A step ahead from graphene, the tungsten disulfides have quite an extended energy band gap. While the monolayer materials are capable of showing off unmatched strength, conductivity, and flexibility, development of practical applications for them has posed a big challenge to the developers. The imperfections in these materials, along with structural disorders badly compromise the charge carriers movement in semiconductors, a simple process referred to as carrier mobility.

Shahrjerdi noticed that in-detail testing of monolayer tungsten disulfide came up with the highest values that are registered for carrier mobility. He says, “It’s a very exciting development for those of us doing research in this field.” The process also unveils several other useful properties, such as when the atomic layers number enhances the band gap gets tunable, empowered by the monolayer thickness it is able to absorb and emit light very intensely making it a perfect fit for optoelectronics applications. Shahrjerdi further clarifies, “We developed a custom reactor for growing this material using a routine technique called chemical vapor deposition. We made some subtle and yet critical changes to improve the design of the reactor and the growth process itself, and we were thrilled to discover that we could produce the highest quality monolayer tungsten disulfide reported in the literature.”