Chemically Tailored Superlattices
Chemically tailored superlattices are one of the two research themes for the NSF-supported UC San Diego MRSEC
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Chemically tailored superlattices are one of the two primary research themes of the UC San Diego Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC), which is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). The chemically tailored superlattices team is focused on developing new ways to control the properties of electrons in sheet-like materials that are only a few atoms thick — so thin that they only allow electrons to move through them in uniquely ordered ways. The order imposed on the electrons by these so-called two-dimensional superlattice structures has a profound impact on their behavior, and it has exciting implications for next-generation electronics.
“A conventional transistor requires roughly a femtojoule of energy per switch,” said Leonid Butov, professor in the Department of Physics at the UC San Diego School of Physical Sciences. “For a data center operating a massive number of processors, each containing billions of transistors, this translates to 20 to 100 megawatts of continuous power consumption.” Butov studies a class of two-dimensional structures containing excitons, which are bound pairs of electrons and electron vacancies. “In theory, excitonic transistors can achieve much lower power consumption per switch than conventional electronic transistors, yielding significant energy savings,” said Butov.
“One of the major challenges in the field of two-dimensional superlattice materials is that it is extremely difficult to make periodic structures with the perfection needed to see correlated quantum phenomena — and it is impossible to make them at the length scales and reproducibility needed for manufacture of practical devices,” said Monica Allen, professor in the Department of Physics at the UC San Diego School of Physical Sciences, who co-leads the Chemically Tailored Superlattices research group.
The team has some of the most advanced synthetic tools available to prepare chemically tailored superlattice materials, and they have developed the precise imaging and spectroscopic tools needed to investigate strongly correlated phenomena. “Theory tells us that we need highly periodic structures with fewer defects. This requires better tools to build them,” said Allen.
Joshua Figueroa, professor in the Department of Chemistry at the UC San Diego School of Physical Sciences, leads the team of chemists in the MRSEC who have been tasked with developing these tools. An expert at building two-dimensional structures called metal organic frameworks, Figueroa and his team are incorporating self-repairing mechanisms within their chemical systems, in order to eliminate defects as they form. “We believe that the power and precision of synthetic molecular chemistry will be a key component here, and we are excited to work with the experimental physicists to bring this new paradigm to fruition,” said Figueroa.
Read more news about: Physical Sciences
UC San Diego MRSEC researchers performing computational work as part of the Chemically Tailored Superlattices team.
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