Tanya Mercado

Major: Chemical Engineering
Mentors: Eric Cui, Professor Stephen Wilson

Mechanical Exfoliation of 3-Dimensional Kagome Metal CsV₃Sb₅

Mechanical exfoliation is a technique widely utilized to produce atomically thin sheets from bulk materials. Since the discovery of this technique in 2004 by Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, it still stands as the most effective way to produce large, uniform areas of nanosheets from a variety of bulk materials. Although mechanical exfoliation may sound simple to implement, it has mostly been proven effect for solids whose individual atomic layers are 2-dimensional. This  research project explores whether mechanical exfoliation can be just as effective on the bulk Kagome superconductor CsV3Sb5, a 3-dimensional crystal, by introducing some variation to the standard mechanical exfoliation method in regard to temperature, heat time, and speed of exfoliation.