One of the most tedious, daunting tasks for undergraduate assistants in university research labs involves looking hours on end through a microscope at samples of material, trying to find monolayers.
These two-dimensional materials -- less than 1/100,000th the width of a human hair -- are highly sought for use in electronics, photonics, and optoelectronic devices because of their unique properties.
"Research labs hire armies of undergraduates to do nothing but look for monolayers," says Jaime Cardenas, an assistant professor of optics at the University of Rochester. "It's very tedious, and if you get tired, you might miss some of the monolayers or you might start making misidentifications."
Even after all that work, the labs then must doublecheck the materials with expensive Raman spectroscopy or atomic force microscopy.
Jesús Sánchez Juárez, a PhD student in the Cardenas Lab, has made life a whole lot easier for those undergraduates, their research labs, and companies that encounter similar difficulties in detecting monolayers.
The breakthrough technology, an automated scanning device described in Optical Materials Express, can detect monolayers with 99.9 percent accuracy -- surpassing any other method to date.
At a fraction of the cost. In far less time. With readily available materials.
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