A Nanomaterial has Been Created that Transmits Heat Only in One Direction

American physicists have discovered that multilayered structures made of two-dimensional materials, with sheets stacked at a certain angle to each other, allow heat to pass through only in one direction. These structures will simplify the cooling of complex electronics, the scientists wrote in an article in the journal Nature.

“Increasing the density of transistors in microchips requires creating new materials with high thermal conductivity that can draw heat from the hottest regions of the chip. We found that a multilayer nanomaterial consisting of two-dimensional layers of molybdenum disulfide can accomplish this task,” the researchers wrote.

Over the past decade and a half, physicists have created a large number of different two-dimensional materials, similar in their properties and structure to graphene, discovered by Nobel laureates Andrew Geim and Konstantin Novoselov in 2004. They include two-dimensional films of molybdenum disulfide, sulfur and molybdenum compounds.

This material has begun to attract particular interest from scientists in recent years because it has several interesting properties that distinguish it from graphene. In particular, two-dimensional molybdenum disulfide can be directly used to create transistors without adding any impurities, and at low temperatures it turns into a superconductor.