Exceptional Electronic Transport & Quantum Oscillations in Thin Bismuth Crystals Grown Inside vdW Materials
The seed team, led by Assistant Professor Javier D. Sanchez-Yamagishi, has developed an innovative approach to thin crystal synthesis by growing bismuth within a nanoscale mold composed of van der Waals (vdW) materials. This atomically-flat vdW mold templates the bismuth crystals, resulting in ultraflat surfaces. The vdW-molded bismuth exhibits exceptional electronic transport properties, allowing us to observe quantum oscillations originating from the surface state Landau levels. These Shubnikov–de Haas oscillations of the magnetoresistance, first discovered in bismuth in 1930, have not previously been observed in bismuth surface states. The crystals enable us to study the intrinsic properties of confined bismuth and its boundary modes.
Additionally, the vdW-molding approach offers a low-cost method to synthesize thin crystals and directly integrate them into vdW heterostructures. The work has been published in Nature Materials.
The research team included collaborators from CCAM (XiaoqingPan, PenghuiCao, RuqianWu, and Luis A. Jauregui) as well as from Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan.