Disassembling 2D van der Waals crystals into macroscopic monolayers and reassembling into artificial lattices

Larger monolayers with gold tapes Although the exfoliation of monolayers of materials such as transition metal dichalcogenides produces high-quality electronic materials with low defect densities, the size of the monolayers is limited to the micrometer scale. Liu et al. modified this method by creating atomically flat gold layers on polymer supports. The strong van der Waals adhesion of the gold layer allowed monolayers to be exfoliated on the centimeter scale. Multilayers could be reassembled to artificial structures, such as a MoSe 2 /WSe 2 single-crystal bilayer with a twist angle chosen to quench intralayer exciton formation. Science , this issue p. 903