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Mixed dimensionality weaves exotic behaviour into superlattices

A compound comprising both one- and two-dimensional components exhibits an unusual response to a magnetic field, demonstrating the potential for ‘heterodimensional’ materials that can host intriguing quantum behaviours.
  1. Berit H. Goodge

    1. Berit H. Goodge is in the Departments of Chemistry and Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.

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  2. D. Kwabena Bediako

    1. D. Kwabena Bediako is in the Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA, and in the Chemical Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA.

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Materials-by-design research aims to create synthetic compounds that have properties with potential either for technological applications or for exploring fundamental physics — ideally, both. One approach is to look for new chemical compositions, but another proven strategy stacks single- or few-atom-thick layers of two or more compounds into close-knit atomic tapestries called heterostructures. Careful engineering of such heterostructures can be used to tailor their properties by manipulating both the short- and long-range interactions between atoms and electrons in the material1,2. This idea has now been extended to the synthesis of ‘heterodimensional’ heterostructures, in which components with different dimensionalities give rise to exotic behaviour, as Zhou et al.3 report in a paper in Nature.

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Nature 609, 38-39 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-02348-w

References

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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