Prof. Douglas Strachan
University of Kentucky
"Low-dimensional properties of atomically-thin materials and systems"
Atomically-thin materials represent the thinnest possible components of future device applications with extreme reduction in size scales. While tremendous progress has recently been made in understanding the large-scale properties of atomically-thin materials, the low-dimensional aspects, although critical to the smallest device sizes, have received comparatively much less attention. Within this important field of atomically-thin materials, I will discuss our recent experimental investigations of the synthesis, local mechanical and electrical properties determined through various scanning probe microscopies, and transport characteristics of these lowdimensional systems. These experiments on atomically-thin materials focus on their edges, ordered low-dimensional phases contained within them, integration with lower dimensional materials (such as 1D nanotubes), and the electrical transport behavior at extremely confined scales -- work which probes the ultimate limits of device-size scaling.