REU Site: Nanomanufacturing of Emerging 2D Materials and Devices

The REU Site entitled Nanomanufacturing of Emerging 2D Materials and Devices hosted by Pennsylvania State University-University Park provides students with a ten-week summer research experience to address problems relevant to the semiconductor industry, a sector in which demand for trained employees in the United States is expected to grow dramatically. Each year ten undergraduate students will be part of small research teams that include faculty advisors and graduate student mentors, all of whom will work together toward a technologically relevant development goal. Each undergraduate on a team will have a responsibility that is integral to the team’s overall objectives. The program will provide training and coaching for mentees and mentors to encourage the development of mentoring relationships that extend beyond the conclusion of the summer experience. REU students will receive training in the responsible conduct of research and laboratory safety. They will also take part in professional development opportunities and meet engineers in the semiconductor industry. The training will ultimately contribute to research and manufacturing infrastructure for semiconductor chips. These efforts will contribute to human resource development through mentorship of a significant fraction of students who are traditionally underrepresented in science and engineering. The REU Site entitled Nanomanufacturing of Emerging 2D Materials and Devices hosted by Pennsylvania State University-University Park provides students with a ten-week summer research experience to address problems relevant to the semiconductor industry, a sector in which demand for trained employees in the United States is expected to grow dramatically. Each year this site will train ten undergraduates by giving them the opportunity to conduct research on two-dimensional semiconductors, a class of layered van der Waals solids that offer unique performance benefits for emerging device technologies and the potential to be integrated with silicon integrated circuits to realize new functionalities. Two-dimensional semiconductors of special interest include the transition metal dichalcogenides, such as molybdenum disulfide and tungsten diselenide, which have a direct band gap in the monolayer limit and exhibit superior transport properties compared to silicon for aggressively scaled devices. The site will also explore topological semimetals, which may be used in electrical interconnects on chips or for optics in the terahertz regime. Researchers will furthermore evaluate the impact of the use of small interdisciplinary teams in a summer undergraduate research site compared to the more common model of each student having a standalone project. The knowledge and experiences that the undergraduate students gain from their summer internships will motivate and prepare them to pursue graduate studies in fields involving nanofabrication. Their training will ultimately contribute to research and manufacturing infrastructure for semiconductor chips and emerging electronic and photonic devices. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.