A team of physicists at RIKEN has developed a transistor-based technique that allows a single-layered material to take on a wide range of electronic behaviors, functioning as a superconductor, metal, semiconductor, or insulator. This approach could lead to the discovery of new superconducting materials.
“The variety of electronic properties based on a single material is highly intriguing to us from a materials science perspective,” says Yoshihiro Iwasa of the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science, who led the study.
The material in question is molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), which can be isolated into atomically thin layers. Each layer consists of molybdenum atoms sandwiched between layers of sulfur atoms. Depending on how these sulfur atoms are arranged, MoS2 can exist in two different structural phases: the 2H phase, which behaves as a semiconductor, and the 1T phase, which acts like a metal.
“2H molybdenum disulfide is highly promising for use in next-generation semiconductor devices,” notes Iwasa.
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