Structures, Properties and Applications of 2D Materials

Early scientific investigations into graphene date back to the 1950s. The interest in graphene intensified when Konstantin Novosolev and Andre Geim were awarded the Nobel prize in physics for ‘groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene’. Since then, other two-dimensional (2D) materials have (re)gained increasing research interest. The most studied 2D materials to date include transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), black phosphorus (BP), hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) and transition metal carbides and/or carbonitrides (MXenes). This chapter introduces these key material groups, and provides a review of the current understanding of their structures and properties. In particular, this chapter will focus on the (opto)electronic properties of the individual 2D materials and their potential applications.