Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 14, 2026

Electric-field Control of Electronic States in WS2 Nanodevices by Electrolyte Gating
Published on: April 12, 2018
Ultralow thermal conductivity in disordered, layered WSe2 crystals
Catalin Chiritescu1, David G Cahill, Ngoc Nguyen
1Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
Abstract:
The cross-plane thermal conductivity of thin films of WSe2 grown from alternating W and Se layers is as small as 0.05 watts per meter per degree kelvin at room temperature, 30 times smaller than the c-axis thermal conductivity of single-crystal WSe2 and a factor of 6 smaller than the predicted minimum thermal conductivity for this material. We attribute the ultralow thermal conductivity of these disordered, layered crystals to the localization of lattice vibrations induced by the random stacking of two-dimensional crystalline WSe2 sheets. Disordering of the layered structure by ion bombardment increases the thermal conductivity.
Related Concept Videos
Superconductor
Types Of Superconductors
Fermi Level
At absolute zero temperature, electrons fill all energy states up to the Fermi level, leaving upper states empty. As the temperature rises,...
Fermi Level Dynamics
Electron affinity in semiconductors refers to the energy gap between the minimum of its conduction band and the vacuum level and it is a critical parameter in determining how easily a semiconductor can accept additional electrons.
The work...
Semiconductors
Metals such as copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), or lead (Pb) have low resistivity and feature conduction bands that are either not fully occupied or overlap with the valence band, making a bandgap non-existent. This allows electrons in the highest energy levels of the valence band to easily transition to the conduction band upon gaining...
Types of Semiconductors

