Following the discovery of graphene in 2003, there has been considerable interest in other types of 2D materials. However, splitting a bulk crystal material into 2D flakes for use in electronics has proven hard to achieve on a commercial scale.

Now, scientists in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT have formulated a method to harvest 2-inch diameter wafers of 2D materials in a matter of minutes. They can then be stacked together to create an electronic device in less than an hour.

The method, which they illustrate in a paper reported in the journal Science, could lead to the possibility of commercializing electronic devices based on a range of 2D materials, according to Jeehwan Kim, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, who headed the research.

The paper’s co-first authors are Sang-hoon Bae, who worked on flexible device fabrication, and Jaewoo Shim, who was involved in the stacking of the 2D material monolayers. They are postdocs in Kim’s group.

The co-authors of the paper also included students and postdocs from within Kim’s group, as well as collaborators at Georgia Tech, the University of Texas, Yonsei University in South Korea, and the University of Virginia. Sang-Hoon Bae, Jaewoo Shim, Wei Kong, and Doyoon Lee in Kim’s research group equally contributed to this research.