Hong Kong seems to have given the world a lesson in how to curb COVID-19 effectively. With a population of 7.5 million, it has reported just 4 deaths. Researchers studying its
2D 2D
2D 2DP hysicists have used almost every superlative they can think of to describe graphene. This gossamer, one-atom-thick sheet of carbon is flexible, transparent, stronger than steel, more conductive than copper and so thin that it is effectively two-dimensional (2D). No sooner was it isolated in 2004 than it became an obsession for researchers around the world.But not for Andras Kis. As miraculous as graphene was, says Kis, "I felt there had to be more than carbon. " So in 2008, when he got the chance to start his own research group in nanoscale electronics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Kis focused his efforts on a class of super-flat materials that had been languishing in graphene's shadow.These materials had an ungainly name -transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) -but a 2D form that was quite simple. A single sheet of transition-metal atoms such as molybdenum or tungsten was sandwiched between equally thin layers of chalcogens: elements, such as sulfur and selenium, that lie below oxygen in the periodic table. TMDCs were almost as thin, transparent and flexible as graphene,
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