Phys.org  April 17, 2023 Interfaces of van der Waals (vdW) materials, such as graphite and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), exhibit low friction sliding due to their atomically flat surfaces and weak vdW bonding. An international team of researchers (UC Irvine, Japan) has demonstrated that microfabricated gold also slides with low friction on hBN. This enables the arbitrary post-fabrication repositioning of device features both at ambient conditions and in situ to a measurement cryostat. They demonstrated mechanically reconfigurable vdW devices where device geometry and position are continuously tunable parameters. By fabricating slidable top gates on a graphene-hBN device, they produced a […]