Naturally occurring van der Waals materials

Abstract

The exfoliation of two naturally occurring van der Waals minerals, graphite and molybdenite, arouse an unprecedented level of interest by the scientific community and shaped a whole new field of research: 2D materials research. Several years later, the family of van der Waals materials that can be exfoliated to isolate 2D materials keeps growing, but most of them are synthetic. Interestingly, in nature plenty of naturally occurring van der Waals minerals can be found with a wide range of chemical compositions and crystal structures whose properties are mostly unexplored so far. This Perspective aims to provide an overview of different families of van der Waals minerals to stimulate their exploration in the 2D limit.

Perspective article. 34 pages, 10 figures, 1 table, more than 170 references

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Cited by in corpus (19)

• Magnetism and Spin Dynamics in Room-Temperature van der Waals Magnet Fe${}_5$GeTe${}_2$
• Adhesion of 2D MoS${}_2$ to Graphite and Metal Substrates Measured by a Blister Test
• Exploring the structural and optoelectronic properties of natural insulating phlogopite in van der Waals heterostructures
• Raman and Far Infrared Synchrotron Nanospectroscopy of Layered Crystalline Talc: Vibrational Properties, Interlayer Coupling and Symmetry Crossover
• High-refractive index and mechanically cleavable non-van der Waals InGaS3
• Phyllosilicates as earth-abundant layered materials for electronics and optoelectronics: Prospects and challenges in their ultrathin limit
• Pressure dependence of intra- and interlayer excitons in 2H-MoS${}_2$ bilayers
• Review on Infrared Nanospectroscopy of Natural 2D Phyllosilicates
• Impacts of dielectric screening on the luminescence of monolayer WSe${}_2$
• Comparative study of quantum emitter fabrication in wide bandgap materials using localized electron irradiation
• Shaping terahertz waves using anisotropic shear modes in a van der Waals mineral
• Quantum effects in structural and elastic properties of graphite: Path-integral simulations
• Isolation and characterization of atomically thin mica phyllosilicates
• Investigation of the Nonlinear Optical Frequency Conversion in Ultrathin Franckeite Heterostructures
• Dielectric permittivity tensor dynamics of in-plane hyperbolic van der Waals MoOCl2 and emergent chiral photonic applications
• Two-dimensional talc as a natural hyperbolic material
• Near-field refractometry of van der Waals crystals
• Quantum Imaging of Ferromagnetic van der Waals Magnetic Domain Structures at Ambient Conditions
• Observation of Photoluminescence from a Natural van der Waals Heterostructure