Dimensionality and carrier concentration have been two most important control knobs for engineering the electronic properties of layered materials and inducing novel properties, e.g. superconductivity. So far, the control of the interlayer interaction is mainly achieved by reducing the sample thickness to atomic scale, however, such atomically thin samples are usually difficult to obtain, unstable in air and with extremely low Tc. In this talk, I will report our recent experimental approach to control both the interlayer coupling and carrier concentration to obtain organic-inorganic hybrid materials with tailored properties through intercalation of organic cations from ionic liquids to transition metal dichalcogenides. Using topological semimetals MoTe2 and WTe2 as examples, I will discuss how such intercalation leads to tailored topological properties and enhanced superconductivity with good sample stability [1]. Such intercalation method can be extended to other layered materials, for example, intercalation of semiconducting SnSe2 crystals leads to superconductivity in the intercalated compound [2].
References:
[1] Haoxiong Zhang et al., “Enhancement of superconductivity in organic-inorganic hybrid topological materials”, Sci. Bull. 65, 188 (2020) [2] Awabaikeli Rousuli et al., “Induced anisotropic superconductivity in ionic liquid cation intercalated 1T-SnSe2”, 2D Mater. 8, 015024 (2021)About the presenter
Prof Shuyun Zhou received her PhD in Physics from University of California at Berkeley in 2007. From 2008 to 2012, she was a postdoc fellow of the Advanced Light Source and a project scientist of Materials Sciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She joined the Department of Physics at Tsinghua University in 2012. Shuyun Zhou’s research focuses on the electronic structure of novel two-dimensional materials and heterostructures using advanced electron spectroscopic tools, including angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), Spin-resolved ARPES, Nano-ARPES and ultrrafast time-resolved ARPES. She has made important progress on the electronic structure of novel transition metal dichalcogenides, type-II topological semimetal and van der Waals heterostructures.