Experimental Study of Nano-materials (Graphene, MoS2, and WSe2)

Since the successful isolation of graphene in 2004, two-dimensional (2D) materials have become one of the hottest research fields in material science. My research is about two kinds of popular 2D materials--graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs). Making graphene into nanoribbons has been predicted and demonstrated to be an effective way to open a bandgap in this pristinely zero-bandgap 2D material. But the rough edge condition of etched graphene nanoribbons has always been a big issue adversely affecting electron transport performance. The electron mean free path of this kind of devices is usually way below the channel width. By using a dual-gate structure based on bilayer graphene/hexagonal boron nitride heterostructure, we found a way to form 300nm-wide conducting channels with high aspect ratio (>15) that can achieve ballistic transport, indicating perfect edge conditions. As the first star member of TMDCs family, monolayer MoS2 is predicted to be strongly piezoelectric, an effect that disappears in the bulk owing to the opposite orientations of adjacent atomic layers. We conduct the first experimental study of the piezoelectric properties of two-dimensional MoS2