Abstract:
Strain engineering in electronics has been widely utilized over the last 20 years to enhance carrier
mobility in most standard Si-based CMOS fabrication processes. These process-induced strain
engineering techniques, engineered from the nanofabrication process itself, are simple, reliable, applied
device-to-device, and highly scalable down to the nanometer scale. In this talk, I will introduce our
groups work in exploring how process-induced strain engineering translates to the world of 2D
materials, and how this may be applied to engineer quantum materials properties. Control over the
strain degree-of-freedom in 2D materials opens new pathways for exploration in engineered quantum
materials, since strain in weakly-bonded 2D systems can go far beyond strain-engineering in
conventional 3D-bonded materials. This will be discussed in the context of three different ongoing
projects in our group: 2D straintronic phase-change transistors/memristors, moiré superlattice
engineering with strain in twisted bilayer 2D heterostructures, and strain-controllable edge state
superconductivity in 2D topological Weyl semimetals.
Bio:
Stephen M. Wu is an Assistant Professor at the University of Rochester in the Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering and the Department of Physics and Astronomy. His research interests involve
engineering quantum materials to create novel electronic or quantum devices. For work in this area, he
has won the NSF CAREER award in 2020. Before Rochester, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Argonne
National Laboratory within the Materials Science Division. He received his Ph.D. in Physics, B.S. in
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and B.A. in Physics all from the University of California,
Berkeley.