Exploring Mass Transport and Crystal Growth on Monolayer Materials

Recently, a long-distance, non-Fickian transport of a uniform layer of atomically thin palladium was discovered to occur surprisingly on atomically thin crystals of tungsten ditelluride due to their novel reactions in 2D. This is followed by the findings of very similar transport and reaction processes of several other combinations of metal and monolayer materials. This 2D reaction process led to the synthesis of a class of new materials, e.g., Pd7WTe2, Pd7MoTe2 and NixWTe2. etc, whose existences were not known previously. Some of these new materials are superconductors. In this talk, we expand this new two-dimensional crystal growth strategy to include various kinds of mass transport and reactions for creating new materials and engineer novel quantum structures. We present both the growth and the characterization of the new materials obtained.