Soft-matter-induced orderings in a solid-state van der Waals heterostructure.

Deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA), a type of soft matter, is often considered a promising building block to fabricate and investigate hybrid heterostructures with exotic functionalities. However, at this stage, investigations on DNA-enabled nanoelectronics have been largely limited to zero-dimensional (0D) and/or one-dimensional (1D) structures. Exploring their potential in higher dimensions, particularly in combination with hard matter solids such as van der Waals (vdW) two-dimensional (2D) materials, has proven challenging.

Structure-Dependent Nonlinear Optical Effects in Spiral WS Nanosheets.

Spiral transition-metal dichalcogenides with broken crystal inversion symmetry and significant second-order nonlinear responses have shown great promise for further nonlinear optical applications. However, various spiral structures will be formed during their synthesis process, their second harmonic generation (SHG) varying with the layer thickness and which of them manifesting the most promising SHG response are still unresolved. Here, the layer-dependent SHG response is investigated for four representative spiral WS with different screw and twist angles, including aligned- and twisted-triangular spiral structures, aligned- and twisted-hexagonal spiral structures, respectively.

Tunable Optical Display of Multilayer Graphene through Lithium Intercalation.

The tunable optical display is vital for many application fields in telecommunications, sensors, and military devices. However, most optical materials have a strong wavelength dependence, which limits their spectral operation range. In this work, we develop an electrically reconfigurable optical medium based on graphene, demonstrating a cycle-controlled display covering the electromagnetic spectrum from the visible to the infrared wavelength.