Facile Production of Macroscopic Single Crystal Monolayers and Artificial Lattices of 2D van der Waals Materials

Two dimensional (2D) materials from layered van der Waals (vdW) crystals hold great promises for electronic, optoelectronic, and quantum devices, but technological implementation has been hampered by the lack of high-throughput techniques for the production of monolayers with sufficient sizes and quality. Here we report a facile method to disassemble vdW single crystals layer-by-layer into monolayers with near-unity yield and with macroscopic dimensions limited only by bulk crystal sizes. The quality of the macroscopic single crystal monolayers are comparable to those of microscopic dimensions obtained from state-of-the-art techniques. We exfoliate a range of vdW crystals and assemble the monolayers into artificial lattices, including transition metal dichalcogenides with dramatic enhancement in nonlinear optical responses. This approach takes us one step closer to commercialization of 2D materials.