April 7 - 11, 2025
Seattle, Washington
2025 MRS Spring Meeting & Exhibit

Symposium QT03-Recent Advances and New Opportunities in van der Waals Heterostructures

Over the past two decades, two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) materials have emerged as an exciting platform for materials science research owing to their wide array of fascinating properties and naturally vertical integrability. Beyond the many unique properties found within the growing families of 2D materials in isolation, exciting new opportunities have arisen upon integrating two or more of these layered materials into heterostructures. Because layers are coupled by van der Waals interactions rather than chemical bonding, these manually-assembled heterostructures can feature rich chemical compositions, flexible stacking orders, designable layer numbers, and gate-controlled physical properties. In the past few years, the discovery of flat electronic bands with hidden quantum geometry has sparked a new era for this field. Moiré superlattice engineering provides one means of generating such flat bands, giving rise to a broad spectrum of interesting electronic phases such as those featuring strong electron correlations and nontrivial band topology. Prime examples are gate-tunable magnetism, superconductivity, Wigner crystallization, nematicity, and (integer and fractional) quantum anomalous Hall effects. Similar phases can also be found in rare crystalline forms of 2D materials even in the absence of any moiré effect. Additional opportunities enabled by combining 2D materials with 3D materials are also starting to be explored. This rapid progress underscores the rich potential for future scientific discoveries and the development of innovative engineering applications by integrating advances in material synthesis, device fabrication, property characterization, and theoretical modeling. Our symposium will highlight the recent developments in 2D material heterostructures of all types, including their synthesis, fabrication, characterization, modeling, and novel devices. Specific focus areas will be on the forefronts of 2D materials discovery, the fabrication of novel vdW heterostructures, understanding intrinsic and extrinsic properties of these materials, and advancing device applications. The symposium will attract a worldwide group of researchers from a variety of scientific backgrounds, all working at the frontiers of these fields. We aim to broadly cover the exciting recent progress in these areas and identify promising future directions for the field.

Topics will include:

  • Discovery and synthesis of new 2D van der Waals materials
  • Growth and integration of vdW heterostructures
  • Electronic, optical, and optoelectronic properties of vdW heterostructures
  • Strongly correlated phases and superconductivity in vdW heterostructures
  • Geometric and topological phenomena in vdW heterostructures
  • Ground- and excited-state properties and charge dynamics of vdW heterostructures
  • Theoretical modeling of vdW heterostructures
  • Development of novel experimental techniques to characterize 2D vdW materials and heterostructures
  • Devices based on vdW heterostructures for quantum information science and engineering

Invited Speakers:

  • Raymond Ashoori (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
  • Leni Bascones (Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid, Spain)
  • Jennifer Cano (Stony Brook University, The State University of New York, USA)
  • Ting Cao (University of Washington, USA)
  • Michael Crommie (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
  • Cory Dean (Columbia University, USA)
  • Kalus Ensslin (ETH Zürich, Switzerland)
  • Philip Kim (Harvard University, USA)
  • Bediako Kwabena (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
  • Jeanie Lau (The Ohio State University, USA)
  • Zhengguang Lu (Florida State University, USA)
  • Qiong Ma (Boston College, USA)
  • Allan MacDonald (The University of Texas at Austin, USA)
  • Stevan Nadj-Perge (California Institute of Technology, USA)
  • Rebeca Ribeiro-Palau (Université Paris-Saclay, France)
  • Sufei Shi (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
  • Emanuel Tutuc (The University of Texas at Austin, USA)
  • Oskar Vafek (Florida State University, USA)
  • Ashvin Vishwanath (Harvard University, USA)
  • Feng Wang (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
  • Di Xiao (University of Washington, USA)
  • Xiaodong Xu (University of Washington, USA)
  • Aiming Yan (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA)
  • Ali Yazdani (Princeton University, USA)
  • Eli Zeldov (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel)
  • Fan Zhang (The University of Texas at Dallas, USA)
  • Yahui Zhang (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
  • Jun Zhu (The Pennsylvania State University, USA)

Symposium Organizers

Long Ju
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
USA

Giulia Pacchioni
SpringerNature
United Kingdom

Jairo Velasco Jr.
University of California, Santa Cruz
Physics
USA

Matthew Yankowitz
University of Washington
Department of Physics, Department of Materials Science and Engineering
USA

Topics

2D materials electrical properties electronic structure magnetic properties optical properties quantum materials spectroscopy