Conférence Walter Kohn - Allan H. MacDonald

Conférence Walter Kohn - Allan H. MacDonald

University of Texas at Austin

Two-Dimensional Materials
In science, new advances often lead to progress in unexpected directions. So it is with
two-dimensional (2D) materials, now nearly 15 years after the pioneering work by Andre Geim and
Kostya Novoselov on the isolation of graphene sheets for which they were awarded the Nobel
Prize in 2010. 2D materials are interesting primarily because they live in a spatial subspace
of our physical world, allowing them to be poked, prodded, and probed from the outside.
This exceptional circumstance is creating opportunities for new fundamental physics discoveries
and for new applications, based in many cases on
new quantum behaviors in 2D. I will discuss some surprising research paths in the study of
two-dimensional materials, which now include among their number
semiconductors, insulators, magnets, superconductors, and topological materials.