New VPD Article Published on High Impact Journal

Our work on facile synthesis 2D crystal, titled 'Evaporative Thinning: A Facile Synthesis Method for High Quality Ultrathin Layers of 2D Crystals' has recently been published on ACSNano. 

In this paper, we show a facile top-down synthesis approach for ultrathin layers of 2D materials down to monolayer. Our method is based on controlled evaporative thinning of initially large sheets, as deposited by vapor mass-transport. Rather than optimizing conditions for monolayer deposition, our approach makes use of selective evaporation of thick sheets to control the eventual thickness, down to a monolayer, a process which appears to be self-stopping. As a result, 2D sheets with high yield, high reproducibility, and excellent quality can be generated with large (>10 μm) and thin (∼1–2 nm) dimensions. Evaporative thinning promises to greatly reduce the difficulty involved in isolating large, mono- and few-layers of 2D materials for subsequent studies.

Our recently graduated alumini Dr. Yi-Kai Huang and VPD third year graduate student Jeffrey D. Cain, contributed equally to this work. Congratualations Yi-Kai and Jeff!