Scalable heterostructures produced through mechanical abrasion of van der Waals powders

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable, low-cost method for producing high-quality van der Waals heterostructures via mechanical abrasion of powders, enabling diverse functional devices with improved performance.

Contribution

It presents a novel mechanical abrasion technique for scalable production of van der Waals heterostructures that maintains high crystal quality and broadens application potential.

Findings

Devices show significant performance improvements over ink-jet printed counterparts.

Method enables fabrication of various heterostructure devices including resistors, capacitors, and photovoltaics.

Compatible with flexible substrates and suitable for large-area applications.

Abstract

To fully exploit van der Waals materials and heterostructures, new mass-scalable production routes that are low cost but preserve the high electronic and optical quality of the single crystals are required. Here, we demonstrate an approach to realize a variety of functional heterostructures based on van der Waals nanocrystal films produced through the mechanical abrasion of bulk powders. Significant performance improvements are realized in our devices compared to those fabricated through ink-jet printing of nanocrystal dispersions. To highlight the simplicity and scalability of the technology a multitude of different functional heterostructure devices such as resistors, capacitors, photovoltaics as well as energy devices such as large-area catalyst coatings for hydrogen evolution reaction and multilayer heterostructures for triboelectric nanogenerators are shown. The simplicity of the device fabrication, scalability, and compatibility with flexible substrates makes this a promising technological route for up-scalable van der Waals heterostructures.