One of our partners is AFMWorkshop, which is a leading American AFM manufacturing company. In late 2020, AFMWorkshop specially designed a glove box and AFM to meet the 2-D materials research requirements – as well as budgetary considerations – of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Photon Lab.
Working through multiple layers of Covid travel protocols, AFMWorkshop’s President Paul West personally visited the MIT facility to install the glove box and HR+ AFM with MIT researchers Qian Song and Riccardo Comin. The noise floor of the HR+ AFM at installation was 25 picometers. Within a year, PhD candidate Song, Professor Comin, and the research of their additional collaborators was accepted for publication in the prestigious Nature journal and published in late February 2022.
The paper looks at two-dimensional materials possessing intrinsic multiferroic properties, which have been long sought after to enable the harnessing of magnetoelectric coupling in nanoelectronic devices 1,9,10. It reports on the discovery of type-II multiferroic order in a single atomic layer of the transition-metal-based van der Waals material NiI2.
Qian Song wrote to AFMWorkshop to inform the team and thank them for their support, he said: “I have good news to share with you. Our first paper on 2-D material has been received by Nature and it will be online next Thursday. Thank you very much for your support. We cannot succeed without your fantastic AFM and the glovebox solution…”
- Song, C.A. Occhialini, E. Ergeçen, B. Ilyas, D. Amoroso, P. Barone, J.Kapeghian, K. Watanabe, T. Taniguchi, A.S. Botana, S. Picozzi, N. Gedik &
- Comin (2022). “Evidence for a single-layer van der Waals multiferroic.” Nature 602: 601–605.