New research using SPID, EPIC facilities published in ACS Nano

SPID facility manager Gajendra Shekhawat co-authored a new publication in ACS Nano, along with his postdoctoral fellow, Qing Tu, NUANCE director Vinayak P. Dravid, and several members of professor Dravid’s research group, including Poya Yasaei and Yaobin Xu.

From the paper’s abstract: “Structural defects and heterogeneities play an enormous role in the formation of localized hot spots in 2D materials used in a wide range of applications from electronics to energy systems. In this report, we employ scanning thermal microscopy (SThM) to spatially map the temperature rise across various defects and heterogeneities of titanium carbide (Ti3C2Tx; T stands for surface terminations) MXene nanostructures under high electrical bias with sub-50 mK temperature resolution and sub-100 nm spatial resolution. We investigated several Ti3C2Tx flakes having different thicknesses as well as heterogeneous MXene structures incorporating line defects or vertical heterojunctions. High-resolution temperature rise maps allow us to identify localized hot spots and to quantify the nonuniformity of the temperature fields across various morphological features. The results show that the local heating is most severe in vertical junctions of MXene flakes and is highly affected by nonuniform conduction due to the presence of line defects. These results provide a direct insight into the power dissipation of MXene-based devices and the roles of various heterogeneities that are inherent to the material synthesis process. This study provides a guideline for how a better understanding of the structure–property–processing correlations and further optimization of the synthesis routes could improve the lifetime, safety, and operation limits of the MXene-based devices.”

Read the full article on ACS Nano’s website.

The work made use of NUANCE’s SPID and EPIC facilities with support from SHyNE, the MRSEC program at the Materials Research Center, and the International Institute for Nanotechnology, among others.