Scientists have designed a 2-D material-based multi-stacked structure comprising tungsten disulfide (WS2) layer sandwiched between hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) layers that displays long-range interaction between successive WS2 layers with potential for reducing circuit design complexity and power consumption.
2-D materials have been popular among materials scientists owing to their lucrative electronic properties, allowing their applications in photovoltaics, semiconductors, and water purification. In particular, the relative physical and chemical stability of 2-D materials allow them to be "stacked" and "integrated" with each other. In theory, this stability of 2-D materials enables the fabrication of 2-D material-based structures like coupled "quantum wells" (CQWs), a system of interacting potential "wells," or regions holding very little energy, which allow only specific energies for the particles trapped within them.
CQWs can be used to design resonant tunneling diodes, electronic devices that exhibit a negative rate of change of voltage with current and are crucial components of integrated circuits. Such chips and circuits are integral in technologies that emulate neurons and synapses responsible for memory storage in the biological brain.
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