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Inorganic semiconductors exhibit multifarious physical properties, but they are prevailingly brittle, impeding their application in flexible and hetero-shaped electronics. The exceptional plasticity discovered in InSe crystal indicates the existence of abundant plastically deformable two-dimensional van der Waals (2D vdW) materials, but the conventional trial-and-error method is too time-consuming and costly. Here we report on the discovery of tens of potential 2D chalcogenide crystals with plastic deformability using a nearly automated and efficient high-throughput screening methodology. Seven candidates e.g., famous MoS2, GaSe, and SnSe2 2D materials are carefully verified to show largely anisotropic plastic deformations, which are contributed by both interlayer and cross-layer slips involving continuous breaking and reconstruction of chemical interactions. The plasticity becomes a new facet of 2D materials for deformable or flexible electronics. It is still challenging to discover plastically deformable inorganic semiconductors. Here, the authors report a high-throughput screening of tens of potential 2D van der Waals crystals that can deform plastically accompanied with experimental verification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inorganic semiconductors are vital for a number of critical applications but are almost universally brittle. Here, we report the superplastic deformability of indium selenide (InSe). Bulk single-crystalline InSe can be compressed by orders of magnitude and morphed into a Möbius strip or a simple origami at room temperature. The exceptional plasticity of this two-dimensional van der Waals inorganic semiconductor is attributed to the interlayer gliding and cross-layer dislocation slip that are mediated by the long-range In-Se Coulomb interaction across the van der Waals gap and soft intralayer In-Se bonding. We propose a combinatory deformability indicator (X) to prescreen candidate bulk semiconductors for use in next-generation deformable or flexible electronics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]