Stacked materials

Leiden physicists study stacks of layered materials using a novel technique. They can now answer the question whether a given stack of various materials has properties different from its constituents by probing the interlayer interactions. They employed this method to verify that graphene (grey) interacts strongly with graphene, and boron nitride (purple) interacts strongly with boron nitride, while graphene is not influenced by the presence of boron nitride. We see on the upper right the resulting material: different properties (shades) for combined graphene + graphene and boron nitride + boron nitride, but no interaction between graphene and boron nitride. On the bottom right we see a hypothetical state where all layers interact to form a completely new material, which is not the case in this example.