Omar Salas
MIT Department: Physics
Faculty Mentor: Prof. Riccardo Comin
Research Supervisors: Sahaj Patel, Qian Song
Undergraduate Institution: University of Texas at El Paso
Hometown: El Paso, Texas
Website: LinkedIn
Biography
Omar Salas is a senior at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), double majoring in Physics and Mathematics. He aims to pursue a Ph.D. in Physics with a focus on Condensed Matter Physics. At UTEP, Omar collaborates with Dr. Harikrishnan Nair on multiferroics, strongly correlated systems, and frustrated magnets. He has published a first-author paper on the resilience of the Aurivillius structure with La and Cr doping. Omar interned at Caltech for two summers, working with Thomas Rosenbaum on the magnetic susceptibility of quasicrystals and with Michael Roukes on assembling dense neuronal recording probes. As an active member of the physics community, he has presented his research at the American Physical Society March meeting and attended the Winter School on High-Pressure Synthesis and Measurement at the University of Maryland. He has served as vice president of both the Society of Physics Students and the Mathematics Club at UTEP. Omar aspires to an academic career as a tenured professor.
Abstract
Growth and Characterization of Atomically Thin 2D Crystals Using
Flux-Assisted Growth
Omar Salas1, Qian Song2, Sahaj Patel2 and Riccardo Comin2
1Department of Physics, University of Texas at El Paso
2Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Two-dimensional materials have gathered interest within the physics community for their unique properties and potential applications. The weak Van der Waals forces between the atoms in the crystal allow samples to be thinned down to the few-layer limit where they can be tuned by various external parameters. Vapor transport and flux method are two conventional methods to grow bulk single crystals. Using Mechanical Exfoliation (ME) the bulk crystals can be thinned down to a single layer of atoms. However, ME usually produces small samples, in the range of 1-10 μm lateral dimensions, making them harder to study. Here we look at Flux-Assisted Growth, a novel method of growing ultrathin crystals of lateral dimensions up to 1 cm, as a viable alternative to ME and vapor deposition. The sample I studied is MoO3 to test the efficiency of this new method. In this work I successfully grew thin flakes of MoO3 and performed Raman spectroscopy to check the crystal composition and quality.
