Kazu Suenaga

National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba 305-8565 Japan

Properties of low-dimensional material highly depend on its atomic structure. The studies of atomic defects and boundaries are of general interest for the fundamental researches and technological applications in any crystalline materials, especially in 2D materials. Point defects and edge structures of graphene have been intensively studied with atomic precision in the last decade. Here I present some new examples for atomic-scale imaging and spectroscopy of various low-dimensional materials with interrupted periodicities. Nitrogen defects and their chemical dynamics of graphene are now studied at individual atom basis [1]. Defects and phase transitions of single-layered dichalcogenides (MX2) are corroborated in situ [2]. In plane anisotropy of single-layered group VII dichalcogenides (ReS2 and ReSe2) is recently reported [3]. Also various new 1D structures inside carbon nanotubes are discovered and investigated [4, 5, 6]. Eventually single atom magnet at grapheme atomic defects will be proposed [7].

[1] Y.-C. Lin et al., Nano Letters, 15 (2015) pp.7408-7413
[2] Y.-C. Lin et al., Nature Communications, 6:6736 (2015)
[3] Y.-C. Lin,et al., ACS Nano (2015) in press DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.5b04851
[4] R. Senga et al., Nature Materials 13 (2014) pp. 1050-1054
[5] L. Tizei et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 114 (2015) 197602
[6] R. Senga and K. Suenaga, Nature Communications, (2015) 6:7943
[7] Y.-C. Lin et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 115 (2015) 206803
[8] This work is partially supported by a JST research acceleration programme.