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PtSe2 is attracting considerable attention as a high mobility two-dimensional material with envisionned applications in microelectronics, photodetection and spintronics. The growth of high quality PtSe2 on insulating substrates with…
The high mechanical strength and excellent flexibility of 2D materials such as graphene are some of their most important properties [1]. Good flexibility is key for exploiting 2D materials in many emerging technologies, such as wearable…
Materials with a layered Kagome lattice are expected to give rise to novel physics arising from band structures with topological properties, spin liquid behavior and the formation of skyrmions. Until now, most work on Kagome materials has…
Vertical stacking of monolayers via van der Waals assembly is an emerging field that opens promising routes toward engineering physical properties of two-dimensional (2D) materials. Industrial exploitation of these engineering…
Unlike conventional epitaxy, van der Waals epitaxy (vdWE) allows nearly stress-free growth of thick films with highly oriented crystals without dislocations even for large film-substrate lattice mismatches. Despite reports of vdWE in…
Graphene is the nature's thinnest elastic membrane, with exceptional mechanical and electrical properties. We report the direct observation and creation of one-dimensional (1D) and 2D periodic ripples in suspended graphene sheets, using…
Two mechanisms for the breakdown of step flow growth, in the sense of the appearance of steps of opposite sign to the original vicinality, are studied by kinetic Monte Carlo simulations and scaling arguments. The first mechanism is the…
The growth of para-sexiphenyl (6P) thin films as a function of substrate temperature on Ir{111} supported graphene flakes has been studied in real-time with Low Energy Electron Microscopy (LEEM). Micro Low Energy Electron Diffraction (\mu…
We study one-dimensional models of particle diffusion and attachment/detachment from islands where the detachment rates gamma(m) of particles at the cluster edges increase with cluster mass m. They are expected to mimic the effects of…
Small islands in the vicinity of the mainland are believed to offer protection from wind and waves and thus coastal communities have been developed in these areas. However, what happens when it comes to tsunamis is not clear. Will these…
Understanding the contact between solid surfaces is a long standing problem which has a strong impact on the physics of many processes such as adhesion, friction, lubrication and wear. Experimentally, the investigation of solid/solid…
The random deposition model must be enriched to reflect the variety of surface roughness due to some material characteristics of the film growing by vacuum deposition or sputtering. The essence of the computer simulation in this case is to…
We investigate the question of stability of a solid thin film which experiences external interactions such as van der Waals forces from a contacting surface or forces from an external electric field. Both perfectly elastic and viscoelastic…
The coagulation of microscopic dust into planetesimals is the first step towards planet formation. The size and shape of the growing aggregates determine the efficiency of this early growth. It has been proposed that fluffy ice aggregates…
The van der Waals interaction between a lipid membrane and a substrate covered by a graphene sheet is investigated using the Lifshitz theory. The reflection coefficients are obtained for a layered planar system submerged in water. The…
Solid phase epitaxy is a crystallization technique used to produce high quality thin films. Lateral solid phase epitaxy furthermore enables the realization of non-planar structures, which are interesting, e.g., in the field of spintronics.…
The instability, dynamics and morphological transitions of patterns in thin liquid films on periodic striped surfaces (consisting of alternating less and more wettable stripes) are investigated based on 3-D nonlinear simulations that…
We propose a physical model which explains the existence of finite thickness wetting layers in epitaxially strained films. The finite wetting layer is shown to be stable due to the variation of the non-linear elastic free energy with film…
Effect of an anisotropic detachment on a heteroepitaxial island shape is studied by means of a kinetic Monte Carlo simulation of a square lattice gas model. Only with molecular deposition followed by surface diffusion, islands grow in a…
Graphene epitaxially grown on Ru(0001) displays a remarkably ordered pattern of hills and valleys in Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) images. To which extent the observed "ripples" are structural or electronic in origin have been much…