X2D

A 2D materials platform empowered by X elemental engineering

X2D is a research platform through to garner projects on 2D materials synthesis and engineering towards nanotechnology applications. X2D emerges as an evolution of the original ERC-CoG grant XFab on the "Xene fabrication for a novel 2D nanotechnology platform" in place from April 2028 to March 2024. The XFab was then paralleled by other aggregated ERC-PoC projects, XMem (2022-23) and TNext (2024- ), concerning with the silicene membranes in flexible electronic devices and tellurene memristors, respectively. Xenes are a relatively new class of 2D elemental materials beyond graphene which includes elements from the group II to the group VI in the periodic table. X2D is more than the follow-up of an ERC project concept, and its ambition is to more generally encompass the development of 2D materials starting from the details of an individual elements. As such, it is the natural target of the past research developed on the materials engineering of transition metal dichalcogenides. In this framework, while we previously investigated the chemical vapor deposition of MoS2 by inducing directional anisotropy by design, more recently we focused on the production of MTe2 (with M=Mo, W, Pt, ...) by governing the Te chemistry during the tellurization of a pre-deposited metal film. This approach paves the way to a phase selection of the nanosheets thereby enabling us to control che electronic character, from a semiconductor (e.g. MoTe2 in the 2H phase) to a metal (e.g. MoTe2 in the 1T' phase) to a Dirac semimetallo (e.g. PtTe2). The X2D platform is so articulated in the main research directions, XFab, XMem, TNext, and MX2, as detailed below.