Valleytronics: Innovative way to store and process information up to room temperature
Researchers at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Northrop Grumman, a multinational aerospace and defense technology company, have found a way to maintain valley polarization at room temperature using novel materials and techniques. This discovery could lead to devices that store and process information in novel ways using this technology without the need to keep them at ultra-low temperatures. Their research was recently published in Nature Communications.
One of the paths being explored to achieve these devices is a relatively new field called “valleytronics.” A material’s electronic band structure — the range of energy levels in each atom’s electron configurations — can dip up or down. These peaks and troughs are known as “valleys.” Some materials have multiple valleys with the same energy. An electron in a system like this can occupy any one of these valleys, presenting a unique way to store and process information based on which valley the electron occupies. One challenge, however, has been the effort and expense of maintaining the low temperatures needed to keep valley polarization stable. Without this stability, devices would begin to lose information. In order to make a technology like this feasible for practical, affordable applications, experts would need to find a way to around this constraint.
Exploring 2D Landscapes for the Perfect Valleys
Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are interesting, layered materials that can be, at their thinnest, only few atoms thick. Each layer in the material consists of a two-dimensional (2D) sheet of transition metal atoms sandwiched between chalcogen atoms. While the metal and the chalcogen are strongly bound by covalent bonds in a layer, adjacent layers are only weakly bound by van der Waal’s interactions. The weak bonds that hold these layers together enable TMDs to be exfoliated down to a monolayer that’s only one “molecule” thick. These are often referred to as 2D materials.
The team at CFN synthesized single crystals of chiral lead halide perovskites (R/S-NEAPbI3). Chirality describes a set of objects, like molecules, that are a mirror image of each other but can’t be superimposed. It is derived from the Greek word for “hands,” a perfect example of chirality. The two shapes are identical, but if you put one hand on top of the other, they will not align. This asymmetry is important for controlling valley polarization.
Flakes of this material, roughly 500 nanometers thick or five-thousandths the thickness of a human hair, were layered onto a monolayer of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) TMD to create what is known as a heterostructure. By combining different 2D materials with properties that affect the charge transfer at the interface between the two materials, these heterostructures open up a world of possibility.
After creating and characterizing this heterostructure, the team was eager to see how it behaved. More