A new remedy has been found to tackle the difficulty of controlling layered nanomaterials. Control can be improved by simply bending the material. The mechanism¹ was observed by Academy Research Fellow Pekka Koskinen from the Nanoscience Center of the University of Jyväskylä together with his colleagues from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the US. Bending decreases interaction between layers, making the material merely a stack of independent atomic layers.

 

The group investigated the van der Waals nanomaterials which consist of stacked and loosely bound two-dimensional atomic layers. It is experimentally difficult to control the number of layers in the stacks -- and each layer may affect the electric and optical properties of the material dramatically.

 

- It's as if the apparent color of a stack of papers would change wildly while adding or removing individual sheets, Pekka Koskinen illustrates² the situation using a fictitious³（虚构的） example.

 

Bending effectively detaches the layers from each other. The mechanism was observed while investigating layered molybdenum disulphide but it is expected to be valid⁴ for the van der Waals materials in general. The results were published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

 

According to Koskinen, the observation advances research in nanoelectronics and optoelectronics because it markedly simplifies the interpretation⁵ and understanding of the electronic and optical properties of layered materials. The research was computational and the found mechanism is still a prediction.

 

"In nanoscience, experimental and theoretical research advance side by side. This time the prediction came first, and now we eagerly await for an experimental confirmation," Koskinen says.

 

The research was funded by the Academy of Finland and used the computational resources of the Finnish IT Center for Science (CSC).

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