Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Seoul National University in South Korea, and the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, have developed a method to visualize the thermally induced rearrangement of two-dimensional (2D) materials, atom-by-atom, from twisted to aligned structures, using transmission electron microscopy. The researchers observed a new and unexpected mechanism for this rearrangement process. "People usually think of the two layers like having two sheets of paper twisted 45° to each other. To get the layers to go from twisted to aligned, you would just rotate the entire piece of paper," said Yichao Zhang, one of the scientists involved in this study. "But what we found, actually, is it has a nucleus – a localized nanoscale aligned domain – and this domain grows larger and larger in size.”
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