To further shrink electronic devices and to lower energy consumption, the semiconductor industry is interested in using 2-D materials, but manufacturers need a quick and accurate method for detecting defects in these materials to determine if the material is suitable for device manufacture. Now a team of researchers has developed a technique to quickly and sensitively characterize defects in 2-D materials.

Two-dimensional materials are atomically thin, the most well-known being graphene, a single-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms.

“People have struggled to make these 2-D materials without defects,” said Mauricio Terrones, Verne M. Willaman Professor of Physics, Penn State. “That’s the ultimate goal. We want to have a 2-D material on a four-inch wafer with at least an acceptable number of defects, but you want to evaluate it in a quick way.”