Creating new opportunities from nanoscale materials

A hundred years ago, "2d" meant a two-penny, or 1-inch, nail. Today, "2-D" encompasses a broad range of atomically thin flat materials, many with exotic properties not found in the bulk equivalents of the same materials, with graphene—the single-atom-thick form of carbon—perhaps the most prominent. While many researchers at MIT and elsewhere are exploring two-dimensional materials and their special properties, Frances M. Ross, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor in Materials Science and Engineering, is interested in what happens when these 2-D materials and ordinary 3-D materials come together.