“Workshop on 2D Materials” in Grenoble – fruit of Polish-French cooperation

23 11 2023

From 15 to 17 November, the “Workshop on 2D Materials” was held at the National High Magnetic Fields Laboratory (Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Intenses – LNCMI) in Grenoble, France. It was dedicated to so-called two-dimensional (2D) materials – an extremely hot topic in contemporary materials research. Twenty-three invited speakers presented their research in this field.

The compounds in question owe their name to their unique structure. The layers of strongly bonded atoms in these materials are held together by much weaker interactions. This makes it possible to exfoliate them relatively easily, as in the case of graphite, to obtain atom-thick samples. It turns out that the properties of such atom-thick layers are dramatically different from those of bulk materials. This opens up enormous possibilities for understanding and applications. Add to this the ability to create structures composed of layers of different materials, a skill that is particularly well developed at the UW Faculty of Physics, and the world of such systems, which do not appear in nature, seems limitless. The workshop included presentations of a number of recent results on atom-thin semiconductor layers of transition metal chalcogenides (MoSe2, WS2), perovskites or magnetic materials. The meeting was also an opportunity to showcase the technological capabilities available at the Faculty of Physics, where the growth of another 2D material – hexagonal boron nitride – is possible.

The event crowned another year of implementation of the IRP “2D Materials” project, in which the French National Centre for Scientific Research – CNRS – supports the efforts of units from France (LNCMI and the Institut Européen des Membranes in Montpellier) and Poland (the UW Faculty of Physics and the Wrocław University of Technology’s Faculty of Fundamental Problems of Technology) focused on understanding the properties of 2D materials.

The workshop was supported by the UW Institute for Advanced Studies. It is also worth mentioning that the high quality of 2D materials research at the UW Faculty of Physics was confirmed by two grants awarded in the recent IDUB competition “New Ideas 3B in Priority Research Area II”: Study of ultrafast photoconductivity in semiconducting layered materials (Prof. Piotr Kossacki) and The bright side of a dark material – optical properties of hafnium sulphide (HfS2) (Prof. Adam Babiński).

For more information on 2D materials research, visit the Laboratory of Optical Spectroscopy website, and for a list of talks given at the Grenoble meeting, visit the event page.