Grants and Contracts Details
Description
Overview: In the continued march towards electronic-size reduction, the interfaces to electrical contacts will inevitably play an increasing role in future nanoscale device characteristics and could well become the critical barriers to improved performances and energy efficiencies. It is widely expected that this steady reduction in size will soon involve the incorporation of the new class of atomically-thin materials into future electronics. While significant progress has recently been made to understanding a plethora of phenomena, such as coherent and ballistic transport within the bulk of atomically-thin materials, much less is understood about such behavior within the vicinity of electrical interfaces. To determine the effects that influence electron transfer and coherent phenomena in the vicinity of atomically-thin interfaces, tunable test devices will be utilized that allow for the ability to locally control the relevant energy and length scales. The outcome of this work should provide an understanding of the quantum transport processes to interfaces consisting of the thinnest possible materials and the interplay between the relevant length and energy scales in their vicinity.
The intellectual merit: The fundamental understanding gained by this study should help to provide a basic foundation and of design principles critical for the future engineering of ultra-small devices where electrical interfaces and quantum coherent phenomena can be important. Since the proposed test structures are themselves tunable, they provide a potential conceptual framework to constructing novel devices which function principally on the behavior of the electrical interfaces to atomically-thin materials. Finally, tuning coherent phenomena at electrical interfaces could provide a way to drastically reduce their contact resistances, which have been collectively identified as a major obstacle to achieving high performance efficient nanoelectronics.
Status | Finished |
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Effective start/end date | 8/15/16 → 8/14/19 |
Funding
- KY Council on Postsecondary Education: $50,000.00
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