Atomically thin semiconductors: new devices and new physics

Hugh Churchill

Pappalardo Fellow MIT Department of Physics

The discovery of two-dimensional crystals—materials only one to a few atoms thick—continues to drive exciting developments in condensed matter physics, more than 10 years after atomically thin graphene was first peeled from graphite.  The techniques used to isolate graphene have now been generalized to other materials with layered structures including a nearly perfect insulator hexagonal boron nitride, an entire family of atomically thin semiconductors such as MoS2 and WSe2, and many more.  These materials can be picked up and stacked together to make a wide variety of electronic devices composed entirely of atomically thin, transparent, and flexible materials.  In this talk I will present an overview of these developments and describe our contributions to the field, including the demonstration of a photovoltaic device and light-emitting diode made from a three-atom thick sheet of WSe2.  Finally, I will give an outlook for how continued improvements in materials and device fabrication are opening up a playground for new devices and new physics in this area.

Bio:

Hugh Churchill is a Pappalardo Fellow in the physics department at MIT, where he studies electronic transport and optoelectronic properties of atomically thin semiconductors with the group of Pablo Jarillo-Herrero.  He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University with Charles Marcus in 2012, where he worked to develop carbon nanotube and Ge/Si nanowire quantum dot devices for use in quantum information processing and participated in the search for Majorana bound states in superconducting nanowires.  He received undergraduate degrees in physics, mathematics, and tuba performance in 2006 from Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music.