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Materials in flatland twist and shine

Four studies demonstrate the vast opportunities provided by stacking pairs of monolayer materials and changing the resulting optical properties by twisting one material with respect to the other.
  1. Bernhard Urbaszek

    1. Bernhard Urbaszek is at the Laboratory of Physics and Chemistry of Nano-Objects, INSA-CNRS-UPS, Toulouse University, Toulouse 31077, France.

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  2. Ajit Srivastava

    1. Ajit Srivastava is in the Department of Physics, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30322, USA.

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Atomically thin materials are currently being investigated for fundamental research and applications in optics and electronics, because they interact strongly with light and have fascinating magnetic properties. When two different monolayer materials are brought into contact to form a bilayer, electrons can no longer move freely in the planes of the atomic layers. Instead, they are trapped in spatially periodic potential-energy variations called moiré potentials, as a result of interactions between the layers1. These nanometre-scale potentials are caused by the layers having different orientations or lattice constants — parameters that describe the dimensions of a unit cell in a crystal lattice. Moiré potentials have been predicted to strongly modify the optical properties of such bilayers2. Four papers in Nature3–6 report observations of optical emission and absorption that confirm this prediction.

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Nature 567, 39-40 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00704-x

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