2D materials provide an exciting platform for high performance electronic and spintronic devices that can be extremely small, have combined functionalities through heterostructure stacking, and can be efficiently controlled by electric and magnetic gates. This holds enormous promise, but there is a huge obstacle that we don’t understand: What is the actual structure of devices at the atomic scale, and how does this determine the device operation? In this project, we will use scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) to directly image the atoms that make up the device. Even more importantly, we will operate the device and use the STM/AFM to probe the critical properties while it is running to image the electronic spectrum, local electric potential, magnetic ordering (via spin-polarized STM), and nonequilibrium spin density with atomic scale spatial resolution. In this way, we can go beyond the standard “black box” approach based on models and inference, and instead open up the “black box” to directly probe the electronic and spintronic properties down to the atomic scale.
| Science | Surface Science … | Atomic Scale Studies of Charge and Spin Transport in 2D Materials and Devices