Physics Commons^™

Proximitized Materials, Igor Žutić, Alex Matos-Abiague, Benedikt Scharf, Hanan Dery, Kirill Belashchenko

Department of Physics and Astronomy: Faculty Publications

Advances in scaling down heterostructures and having an improved interface quality together with atomically thin two-dimensional materials suggest a novel approach to systematically design materials. A given material can be transformed through proximity effects whereby it acquires properties of its neighbors, for example, becoming superconducting, magnetic, topologically nontrivial, or with an enhanced spin-orbit coupling. Such proximity effects not only complement the conventional methods of designing materials by doping or functionalization but can also overcome their various limitations. In proximitized materials it is possible to realize properties that are not present in any constituent region of the considered heterostructure. While the …