Rice, Oak Ridge labs make semiconducting films for
atom-thick circuits
Scientists at Rice University and Oak Ridge National
Laboratory (ORNL) have advanced on the goal of two-dimensional electronics with
a method to control the growth of uniform atomic layers of molybdenum disulfide
(MDS).
MDS, a semiconductor, is one of a trilogy of materials
needed to make functioning 2-D electronic components. They may someday be the
basis for the manufacture of devices so small they would be invisible to the
naked eye.
The work appears online this week in Nature Materials.
The Rice labs of lead investigator Jun Lou, Pulickel Ajayan
and Boris Yakobson, all professors in the university’s Mechanical Engineering
and Materials Science Department, collaborated with Wigner Fellow Wu Zhou and
staff scientist Juan-Carlos Idrobo at ORNL in an unusual initiative that
incorporated experimental and theoretical work.