NEWSROOM

Researchers at the Institute for Basic Science converted a single tungsten diselenide crystal into a working transistor by selectively oxidizing and reacting its top atomic layers. The resulting tungsten oxide served as a sub-nanometer gate dielectric, while tungsten ditelluride contacts cut the charge injection barrier to about a third of that seen with platinum.

Researchers at Jena and Regensburg have demonstrated a new optical method to quantitatively determine the Berry curvature of tungsten diselenide, an atomically thin semiconductor. By firing two ultrashort laser pulses at the sample and analysing the polarisation of the emitted second-harmonic light, they extracted the local Berry curvature within hundreds of femtoseconds, matching theoretical predictions.

Two new studies catalog nearly 9,000 two-dimensional materials and identify 61 semimetals and 1,568 insulators suited to twistronics, the stacking and rotating of atomically thin layers to engineer narrow electronic bands. The work maps topological electronic structures, predicts promising twisted bilayers such as tin diselenide and hafnium disulfide, and confirms several candidates can be grown in bulk and exfoliated into working devices, giving researchers a systematic rout