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Updated: Jan 28, 2026
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Residue-Free Fabrication of van der Waals Heterostructures of Two-Dimensional Materials
Published on: July 18, 2025
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van der Waals Nanochemical Reactors
Zhaoyi Joy Zheng1,2, Haosen Guan1, Danrui Ni3
1Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, United States.
Nano Letters
|January 26, 2026
Summary
Van der Waals (vdW) stacks act as nanochemical reactors for synthesizing high-quality single crystals of quantum materials. This versatile method enables the growth of elemental and compound crystals for advanced electronic discoveries.
Area of Science:
- Materials Science
- Condensed Matter Physics
- Nanotechnology
Background:
- Synthesizing high-quality single crystals for quantum electronics is difficult for novel materials.
- Existing methods face limitations in scalability and material compatibility.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce and demonstrate the utility of van der Waals (vdW) stacks as nanochemical reactors for single-crystal synthesis.
- To explore the broad applicability of this method for growing diverse quantum materials.
Main Methods:
- Utilized vdW stacks as nanoreactors by encapsulating atomically thin reactants within inert vdW layers.
- Achieved nanoconfined synthesis, resulting in encapsulated single crystals.
- Synthesized elemental tellurium and palladium-tellurium (Pd-Te) compound crystals.
Main Results:
- Confirmed high crystalline quality of synthesized tellurium and Pd-Te single crystals via structural characterization.
- Observed the intrinsic semiconducting gap in tellurium crystals.
- Discovered superconductivity in nonstoichiometric PdTe1-x with reduced tellurium content.
Conclusions:
- vdW nanoreactors offer a generalizable, chip-integrable, and nanofabrication-compatible approach for single-crystal synthesis.
- This method expands the accessible landscape of quantum materials for electronic applications.
- The technique is suitable for various processing conditions and material types.
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