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Designing inorganic semiconductors with cold-rolling processability

Authors :
Wang, Xu-Dong
Tan, Jieling
Ouyang, Jian
Zhang, Hangming
Wang, Jiang-Jing
Wang, Yuecun
Deringer, Volker L.
Zhou, Jian
Zhang, Wei
Ma, En
Publication Year :
2022

Abstract

While metals can be readily processed and reshaped by cold rolling, most bulk inorganic semiconductors are brittle materials that tend to fracture when plastically deformed. Manufacturing thin sheets and foils of inorganic semiconductors is therefore a bottleneck problem, severely restricting their use in flexible electronics applications. It was recently reported that a few single-crystalline two-dimensional van der Waals (vdW) semiconductors, such as InSe, are deformable under compressive stress. Here we demonstrate that intralayer fracture toughness can be tailored via compositional design to make inorganic semiconductors processable by cold rolling. We report systematic ab initio calculations covering a range of van der Waals semiconductors homologous to InSe, leading to material-property maps that forecast trends in both the susceptibility to interlayer slip and the intralayer fracture toughness against cracking. GaSe has been predicted, and experimentally confirmed, to be practically amenable to being rolled to large (three quarters) thickness reduction and length extension by a factor of three. Our findings open a new realm of possibility for alloy selection and design towards processing-friendly group-III chalcogenides for flexible electronic and thermoelectric applications.

Details

Database :
arXiv
Publication Type :
Report
Accession number :
edsarx.2207.02670
Document Type :
Working Paper