journal article·2026-07-23

Van der Waals surface reconstruction for oriented epitaxial growth of two-dimensional metallic oxides

Mei Zhao, Kenan Zhang, Shaowen Xu, Yuyin Li, Yuan Lu, Jiawen You, Chenchen Huang, Minting Lei, Zhien Wang, Yunyue Zhu, Tianyi Zhang, Charles B. Musgrave, Jiangtao Wang, Shuang Pan, Chao Zou, Zhengtang Luo, Ning Dai, William A. Goddard, Shun Wang, Jing Kong, Lijie Zhang

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Abstract

Hybrid integration of two-dimensional single-crystalline metal oxides, including semiconductors, dielectrics, ferroelectrics and ferromagnetics, with silicon circuits enables functionalities such as spintronics and neuromorphic and quantum computing, forming a key part of the 'More-than-Moore' roadmap. However, synthesizing two-dimensional metal oxide single-crystal films has remained challenging. Here we report a van der Waals surface reconstruction of mica for the general large-scale, unidirectional growth of two-dimensional metal oxides (where M = Co, Fe, Ni, Mn) and their doped counterparts, which seamlessly coalesce into single-crystalline films. Quantum mechanics calculations reveal that reconstructing mica's oxygen atomic plane is critical for achieving the single-crystal epitaxy of these two-dimensional metal oxides. As an example, centimetre-scale two-dimensional Fe-doped CoO single-crystalline films were grown and exhibit room-temperature ferromagnetic semiconductor properties with a high Curie temperature of up to 430 K. These results demonstrate the power of this synthesis strategy, enabling the exploration of two-dimensional metal oxides for quantum physics and spintronics devices.
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Research context

OpenAlex topics: Electronic and Structural Properties of Oxides · 2D Materials and Applications · Graphene research and applications

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

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