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10 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: October 18, 2026.
University of Chicago researchers grew bismuth telluride just two layers thick, thousands of times wider than earlier patches, though electrical tests remain to be done.
Published in Science, the method converts selected layers of tungsten diselenide into the semiconductor, insulator and metal-like contacts a transistor needs, with control near 0.7 nanometers.
Neither long-range magnetic order nor ferroelectric order survives easily in a sheet a few atoms thick, and getting both to coexist at 19°C was thought to be extraordinarily hard. Cheng Gong's team did it by building each order in its own layer and pressing the layers together.
Merons and antimerons had only ever been seen in thick oxide crystals. Now a semiconductor a few atoms thick hosts a whole network of them, and the team can tell which come from twist and which from strain.
A single atomic layer of tungsten diselenide, a few degrees above absolute zero, and a beam of light gave physicists their first read on the inner life of a Wigner crystal.
Researchers discover that promising 2D materials lose their electronic advantages when paired with insulating layers due to invisible nanoscale separation.
Researchers discover that tiny 0.14-nanometer separation between materials weakens electronic performance and could prevent further miniaturization of computer chips.
German scientists replaced conventional acid etching with a molten salt and iodine process to produce atomically perfect MXene sheets with tunable electromagnetic properties for radar, shielding, and electronics.
A German research team replaced acid etching with molten salts and iodine vapor to produce perfectly ordered 2D materials — making them viable for radar coatings, flexible electronics, and advanced wireless systems.
A University of Texas at Austin team cooled an atomically thin sheet of nickel phosphorus trisulfide to watch it spontaneously form the paired magnetic vortex structures predicted by the 1970s BKT theory — confirming that topologically protected magnetic states can exist in actual crystals, with potential implications for next-generation data storage.