Credit: National University of Singapore A team of scientists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has successfully developed a method to chemically exfoliate molybdenum disulfide crystals, a class of chalcogenide compounds, into high quality monolayer flakes, with higher yield and larger flake size than current methods. The exfoliated flakes can be made into a printable solution, which can be applied in printable photonics and electronics. This breakthrough, led by Professor Loh Kian Ping, who heads the Department of Chemistry at the NUS Faculty of Science, and is also a Principal Investigator with the Graphene Research Centre at the Faculty, has generic applicability to other two-dimensional chalcogenides, such as tungsten diselenide and titanium disulfide, and results in high yield exfoliation for all of these two-dimensional materials. The NUS team collaborated with scientists from the Ulsan National Institute of Scienceand Technology in Korea, and the findings were first published online in prestigious scientific journal Nature Communications on 2 January 2014. Demand for high efficiency exfoliation method Transition metal dichalcogenides, formed by a combination of chalcogens, such as sulphur or selenium, and transition metals, such as molybdenum or tungsten, have recently attracted great attention as the next generation of two-dimensional materials due to their unique

The post Novel exfoliation method paves the way for two-dimensional materials to be used in printable photonics has been published on Technology Org.