Two-dimensional (2D) materials’ properties are highly susceptible to external perturbations. This presents tremendous new opportunities for manipulating the behavior of novel 2D layered materials and, ultimately, achieving unprecedented control over their performance when integrated into highly specific functional devices. However, strategies that enable such control are sorely lacking to date and remain an outstanding challenge for the materials science community. Progress here requires of a comprehensive microscopic picture of the fundamental properties of 2D materials in clear connection to their macroscopic behavior, a knowledge that is still missing due to the lack of experimental techniques that simultaneously probe multiple length regimes.
In LINKSPM, we aim at achieving control over the electronic ground state of 2D materials via external stimuli such as strain and electromagnetic fields. To this purpose, we focus on strongly correlated 2D materials as they exhibit rich electronic phase diagrams with diverse collective electronic phases such as superconductivity and charge density wave order. Therefore, the project’s first goal will be to unveil their phase diagram of the key 2D materials in the monolayer limit. Subsequently, we will investigate the interplay between these external stimuli and microscopic electronic phases, and to unambiguously correlate them with mesoscopic electrical transport and mechanical response.
This project comprises three research thrusts: (i) Development of new instrumentation that provides a direct way to correlate atomic-scale and mesoscopic properties of materials, and to establish links between (ii) the electrical conductivity and (iii) the mechanical response of 2D correlated materials with their atomic-scale structure and stimulus-dependent electronic phase diagram.
