Graphene Devices and New Low Dimensional Materials

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While graphene is a still a relatively new material, it has now been around for a little over 10 years, with the discovery of exfoliated graphene in 2004 and of large scale CVD graphene in 2009. Since then enormous progress has been made in terms of the synthesis and characterization of its numerous exceptional properties. We were fortunate to be part of this exceptional journey and made several important contributions on CVD graphene, in particular the determination of the phonon dispersion using different isotopes, the discovery of the connection between strong and weak localization in weak to strongly disordered graphene, the discovery of fractal graphene and its robustness to the quantum Hall effect, and the determination of the local growth rates, to name just a few. A lot of our more recent research has also focused on developing new applications, since many of graphene's fundamental properties are now well understood. The main goal for us now, is to use graphene as a tool and platform for new discoveries as well as for graphene based applications.******The main themes for our future research program are hybrid materials, new low dimensional materials beyond graphene, and graphene applications. We will build our research program on our expertise on new materials acquired over many years in synthesis, processing, characterization, and theory and modelling. We are fortunate to be in this position, which will enable us to make rapid progress in these new proposed directions. In particular, (A) Hybrid materials: some of the most fascinating directions we propose to explore are related to the opportunity we now have to create totally new materials by combining for example a layer of graphene with a layer of superconductor, insulator, or magnetic layer. This could lead to an explosion of new interesting properties, including topological ones, pioneered long ago by Euler. We will look at topological insulators by inducing a strong spin-orbit coupling in graphene, Majorana states in graphene/superconductor junctions as well as creating and using entangled pairs by the superconducting proximity effect. (B) New low dimensional materials, such as MoS2, WS2 and h-BN by using CVD synthesis. Finally, (C) graphene based applications, such as high resolution dynamic imaging in solution using our newly developed graphene based wet cells, where we observed Brownian motion of nanoparticles at 5nm spatial resolution and 30Hz time resolution. We propose to further increase the spatial and time resolution and apply it to characterize the Brownian motion of non-spherical particles, such as rods, clusters and biomolecules in the presence of boundaries and collisions. In addition, we will develop new approaches for optoelectronic devices based on graphene, as well as graphene based sensors. Many of these new device applications will involve hybrid structures too.**