ESE Fall Seminar – “Engineering with Atomic-Scale Building Blocks: From Complex Properties to Functional Devices”

As the demand for computing power and complexity continues to grow, developing new paradigms of information processing is essential. Unconventional functionalities arising from atomically engineered materials offer pathways to address these challenges. This has motivated the rapid development of atomic-scale materials as building blocks for future nanosystems. Their integration into functional devices, however, is hindered by incompatibility with conventional top-down fabrication processes. We overcome these limitations by leveraging the principles of additive manufacturing to enable atomic-scale control of nanomaterials and their heterogeneous integration into functional structures. Within these building blocks, we embed complex functionalities that can be spatiotemporally controlled, spanning multiple physical domains – including electrical, optical, mechanical, and chemical – to develop platforms for next-generation information processing. In this talk, I will highlight examples based on two-dimensional materials, molecules, and quantum dots. Specifically, I will discuss enhanced two-dimensional devices through van der Waals integration, deterministic on-chip perovskite light sources for photonic quantum technologies, and a nanomechanics-enabled platform for neuromorphic computing.