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Two-dimensional (2D) materials have attracted a great deal of interest in recent years. This family of materials allows for the realization of versatile electronic devices and holds promise for next-generation (opto)electronics. Their electronic properties strongly depend on the number of layers, making them interesting from a fundamental standpoint. For electronic applications, semiconducting 2D materials benefit from sizable mobilities and large on/off ratios, due to the large modulation achievable via the gate field-effect. Moreover, being mechanically strong and flexible, these materials can withstand large strain (＞10%) before rupture, making them interesting for strain engineering and flexible devices. Even in their single layer form, semiconducting 2D materials have demonstrated efficient light absorption, enabling large responsivity in photodetectors. Therefore, semiconducting layered 2D materials are strong candidates for optoelectronic applications, especially for photodetection. Here, we review the state-of-the-art in photodetectors based on semiconducting 2D materials, focusing on the transition metal dichalcogenides, novel van der Waals materials, black phosphorus, and heterostructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Icosahedral symmetry, which is not compatible with truly long-range order, can be found in many systems, such as liquids, glasses, atomic clusters, quasicrystals and virus-capsids. To obtain arrangements with a high degree of icosahedral order from tens of particles or more, interparticle attractive interactions are considered to be essential. Here, we report that entropy and spherical confinement suffice for the formation of icosahedral clusters consisting of up to 100,000 particles. Specifically, by using real-space measurements on nanometre- and micrometre-sized colloids, as well as computer simulations, we show that tens of thousands of hard spheres compressed under spherical confinement spontaneously crystallize into icosahedral clusters that are entropically favoured over the bulk face-centred cubic crystal structure. Our findings provide insights into the interplay between confinement and crystallization and into how these are connected to the formation of icosahedral structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SrIrO 3 , the three-dimensional member of the Ruddlesden–Popper iridates, is a paramagnetic semimetal characterised by a the delicate interplay between spin–orbit coupling and Coulomb repulsion. In this work, we study the anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR) of SrIrO 3 thin films, which is closely linked to spin–orbit coupling and probes correlations between electronic transport, magnetic order and orbital states. We show that the low-temperature negative magnetoresistance is anisotropic with respect to the magnetic field orientation, and its angular dependence reveals the appearance of a fourfold symmetric component above a critical magnetic field. We show that this AMR component is of magnetocrystalline origin, and attribute the observed transition to a field-induced magnetic state in SrIrO 3 . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]