Designing Inorganic Semiconductors with Cold-Rolling Processability.

While metals can be readily processed and reshaped by cold rolling, most bulk inorganic semiconductors are brittle materials that tend to fracture when plastically deformed. Manufacturing thin sheets and foils of inorganic semiconductors is therefore a bottleneck problem, severely restricting their use in flexible electronic applications. It is recently reported that a few single-crystalline 2D van der Waals (vdW) semiconductors, such as InSe, are deformable under compressive stress.

Sub-Angstrom Characterization of the Structural Origin for High In-Plane Anisotropy in 2D GeS.

Materials with layered crystal structures and high in-plane anisotropy, such as black phosphorus, present unique properties and thus promise for applications in electronic and photonic devices. Recently, the layered structures of GeS and GeSe were utilized for high-performance polarization-sensitive photodetection in the short wavelength region due to their high in-plane optical anisotropy and wide band gap. The highly complex, low-symmetric (monoclinic) crystal structures are at the origin of the high in-plane optical anisotropy, but the structural nature of the corresponding nanostructures remains to be fully understood.