Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jan 6, 2026

Fabricating van der Waals Heterostructures with Precise Rotational Alignment
Published on: July 5, 2019
Directional massless Dirac fermions in a layered van der Waals material with one-dimensional long-range order
Abstract:
One or a few layers of van der Waals (vdW) materials are promising for applications in nanoscale electronics. Established properties include high mobility in graphene, a large direct gap in monolayer MoS2, the quantum spin Hall effect in monolayer WTe2 and so on. These exciting properties arise from electron quantum confinement in the two-dimensional limit. Here, we use angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy to reveal directional massless Dirac fermions due to one-dimensional confinement of carriers in the layered vdW material NbSi0.45Te2. The one-dimensional directional massless Dirac fermions are protected by non-symmorphic symmetry, and emerge from a stripe-like structural modulation with long-range translational symmetry only along the stripe direction as we show using scanning tunnelling microscopy. Our work not only provides a playground for investigating further the properties of directional massless Dirac fermions, but also introduces a unique component with one-dimensional long-range order for engineering nano-electronic devices based on heterostructures of vdW materials.
Related Concept Videos
Van der Waals Interactions
Van der Waals Equation
First, the attractive forces between molecules, which are stronger at higher densities and reduce the pressure, are considered by adding to the pressure a term equal to the square of the molar density multiplied by a positive coefficient a. Second, the volume...
The de Broglie Wavelength
Valence Bond Theory
First Law: Particles in One-dimensional Equilibrium
First Law: Particles in Two-dimensional Equilibrium
Newton's first law tells us about...

