Gecko toes can lift and release a single atomic sheet of material, and a robotic assembly line will use the same trick to build custom quantum materials layer by layer. Today, stacking just a few atom-thin layers of materials like graphene has already produced breakthroughs in electronics and photonics. But making structures with tens or hundreds of precisely chosen layers is slow, unreliable, and impossible to reproduce at the quantum scale. This project solves that by mimicking the gecko’s reversible adhesion—microfibril arrays that grip or release a sheet on command, controlled by mechanical actuation. The team will build a fully autonomous pilot line that combines robotic pick-and-place, computer vision, and machine intelligence to assemble each layer with in-situ quality control. If successful, the pilot line will produce moiré heterostructures—stacked layers with a controlled twist—that are reproducible and deterministic. This would turn a handcrafted curiosity into a scalable manufacturing process for programmable three-dimensional quantum solids. The immediate impact is on fundamental science: enabling researchers to explore quantum phenomena in materials that cannot exist in nature. In the longer term, such materials could underpin new types of sensors, energy devices, or quantum computers, but the project’s primary goal is to make the fabrication itself reliable enough for those applications to be tested at all.
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Atomically thin materials provide a wide range of fundamental semiconductor device building blocks with unique electronic and optical properties which do not exist in the bulk. Remarkably, the atomic sheets can be stacked together without restriction to form heterostructures with unprecedented properties and capabilities. To date, heterostructure devices consisting of only a handful of individual atomic layers have led to extraordinary breakthroughs in photonics, electronics, and quantum materials. A tantalizing dream is to go beyond these few-layer systems and construct designer materials comprised of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of atomic layers, each precisely chosen and placed. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art layer-by-layer fabrication of such structures is tedious, low-yield, and not reproducible at the quantum level. Inspired by nature, 2D-Gecko aims to revolutionize the layer-by-layer-fabrication of heterostructures to realize highly reproducible materials and devices of limitless complexity. We will pioneer "smart" pick-and-place assembly of individual atomic sheets using microfibril arrays, similar to a gecko, to achieve reversible adhesion - switchable via mechanical actuation. We will incorporate this technology into a fully autonomous pilot line, combining robotic control of all assembly steps with efficient computer-vision, machine intelligence algorithms, and in-situ metrology techniques for quality control. The pilot line will be exploited to fabricate highly tunable quantum materials based on stacking layers with a relative twist (so-called moiré heterostructures) in a reproducible and deterministic fashion. Ultimately, we aim to realize scalable moiré materials, with reproducibility at the quantum level, such that programmable three-dimensional moiré solids can be realized.
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