More Magic with Atomic Crystals

Atomically thin crystals, that are grown, combined, and integrated in large scale, can enable novel properties previously unimaginable. Such "magical" properties can span functional dimensions that go beyond widely-explored electronic phenomena, resulting in extreme thermal, photonic, and mechanical properties. In this talk, I will discuss latest examples with such magical properties realized with atomic crystals. First, we demonstrated three atom thick photonic waveguides, named delta-waveguide, that can generate light plane waves that propagate freely along the waveguide plane but confined along the out-of-plane direction. This enables integrated two-dimensional photonics and seamless mode matching with free-beam optics. Second, we demonstrated the fabrication and measurements of wafer-scale atomic crystal membranes on water that behave like a freestanding mechanical film. We discover that these membranes are not flat; instead they self-wrinkle with the wrinkle morphologies following a universal scaling law, as shown by continuum mechanics theory. This enables a tuning of their mechnical moduli over multiple orders of magnitude.