IBS-VdWQS aims to create “heteroepitaxial van der Waals (vdW) quantum solids at system scales,” where their crystal lattices and symmetries are artificially molded in atomic precision by epitaxial growth.

Two-dimensional (2D) vdW materials are layered materials, where covalently bonded one or three atom thick layers without any dangling bond to the third direction are weakly bound through vdW forces; thus electronic and atomic motions are confined in atomic layers.

Often, the 2D layers are coordinated with hexagonal or honeycomb lattices. Such lattices can be artificially stacked to form another set of condensed matter with exotic interlayer couplings, giving rise to layer-number dependent electronic structures, flat-band correlations, and interlayer (indirect) excitons. These are emergent material phenomena unprecedented in other material classes.

IBS-VdWQS will hold promises to open up a new quantum technology based on an emerging class of 2D vdW solid, which can be comparable to the historic works of device materials innovation, such as Bruce Joyce at Plessey for Si ICs with MBE grown Si layers on SiO2, and Arthur Gossard and Alfred Cho at Bell Labs for HEMTs and diverse quantum transport with GaAs/AlGaAs superlattices, and Isamu Akasaki and Shuji Nakamura at Japan for LEDs with epitaxial GaN.

IBS-VdWQS creates another material class of synthetic quantum solids in multi-dimensions beyond manual transfer and stacking of vdW crystals. Instead, IBS-VdWQS focuses on creating proper materials systems that advance physical phenomena, where the new material phenomena can be discovered and translated into system-scale devices..