April 2014
NE postdoc, Johnny Wong, has received the prestigious Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship from the European Commission. The Marie Curie Fellowship is intended to fund Europe-based scientists to work aboard in order to acquire a new level of professional maturity and establish long-term collaboration with international scientists.
The 3-year research fellowship will allow Johnny to explore spin-valleytronics in high-quality epitaxial transition-metal dichalcogenide monolayers. The intrinsically strong coupling between the spin and valley degrees of freedom in these monolayers might form a promising new paradigm in electronics. The first (outgoing) phase of the fellowship will be conducted in the groups of Dr. Wei Chen and Prof. Andrew Wee at National University of Singapore, and the second (return) phase will be carried out at the NE group.
(a) Lattice structure of MoS2 monolayer, a representative example of transition-metal dichalcogenides
(b) its corresponding electronic band structure. The presence of inversion asymmetry, along with a strong spin-orbit coupling, due to its heavy Mo atoms, leads to spin splitting in the valence band edges (~0.15 eV). The inequivalent valleys at K and –K constitute a binary index for low energy carriers.
