The most prominent representative among the strictly two-dimensional materials is no doubt graphene. It is gifted with outstanding electrical, thermal and mechanical properties. It’s very responsive to its environment, since interactions of any material with the environment proceed through the surface and 2D materials are nothing but a surface. This may be a blessing for sensing, but can also be a curse as it frequently degrades the electrical properties. Attempts to alleviate the detrimental impact of environment have been the key impetus for the development of 2D material stacks in which graphene is encapsulated between boron nitride layers. It drastically reduces the influence of the environment and it is possible to enhance graphene’s electrical conduction properties significantly. This straightforward example can however be generalized to generate more complex so-called van der Waals heterostructures with more elaborate sequences of 2D materials. This presentation will motivate the need for van der Waals stacking to bring out the best of 2D materials and will give a flavor of how powerful van der Waals stacking can be to create designer heterostructures with engineered properties. It will address just a few of the simplest examples, both covering applied and basic sciences, but they will bring the point home that van der Waals stacking is a truly powerful paradigm.  

个人简介：

Jurgen Smet is heading the independent research group Solid State Nanophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research. He graduated with a Master degree in Electrical Engineering from the Catholic University of Leuven in 1990. In 1994, he received his Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachussets Institute of Technology, Cambridge U.S.A, with research on intrawell and interwell intersubband transitions in single and multiple quantum well structures. He joined the von Klitzing department at the Max-Planck-Institute in October 1994 as a postdoc to investigate composite fermions in the two-dimensional electron system. 

Following his appointment as a senior scientist, he expanded his research activities to include transport studies on periodically modulated semiconductor systems, phase coherent transport in semiconductor nanostructures, electron correlation and spin interaction phenomena in the two-dimensional electron system, picosecond time-resolved transport studies of semiconductor nanostructures, microwave and millimeter photoconductivity studies as well as the generation of terahertz radiation with self-assembled nanoislands. 

He received the Gerhard Hess young investigator award from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in 2000. His achievements in the area of composite fermions and his investigations on electron spin - nuclear spin interactions in the two-dimensional electron system were recognized with the Walter Schottky Prize of the German Physical Society (DPG) in 2003. In 2004 he was granted a young investigator award for nanotechnology research from the German Ministry of Science and Education.