van der Waals tagged posts

A new material has properties that make it a promising candidate for new areas like magnetic twistronic devices and spintronics, as well as advances in data storage and device design.

All the elements are there to begin with, so to speak; it’s just a matter of figuring out what they are capable of – alone or together. For Leslie Schoop’s lab, one recent such investigation has uncovered a layered compound with a trio of properties not previously known to exist in one material.

With an international interdisciplinary team, Schoop, assistant professor of chemistry, and Postdoctoral Research Associate Shiming Lei, published a paper last week in Scien...

Schematic depiction of different energy terms contributing to the adsorption energy, and charge density difference of 2H-P after adsorption onto Cu(111) at 12.8 Angstrom separation. Credit: M. Müller/TU Munich

As we continue to shrink electronic components, top-down manufacturing methods begin to approach a physical limit at the nanoscale. A solution involves bottom-up self-assembly of molecular building blocks to build nanoscale devices.

Successful self-assembly is an elaborately choreographed dance, in which the attractive and repulsive forces within molecules, between each molecule and its neighbors, and between molecules and the surface that supports them, have to all be taken into account...