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What if the most powerful materials of the future are only one atom thick? In this episode of No Reason to Get Excited (NRTGE), Dr. Aaron Winkler sits down with Fang Liu, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University, to explore the cutting-edge world of two-dimensional materials, where single-atom-thick semiconductors stack, twist, and transform in ways that could redefine electronics, quantum computing, and energy technology.

From a childhood in Northeast China where she barely made it into chemistry at Peking University (the major with the lowest score threshold), to inventing a gold-based exfoliation technique that won her a faculty position at Stanford, Fang walks through how her lab creates moiré superlattices at centimeter scales, uses ultrafast lasers to make atomic lattices twist in trillionths of a second, and collaborates with Cornell and SLAC to watch quantum materials dance. Along the way, she and Aaron dig into why Scotch tape won a Nobel Prize, what lives between van der Waals forces and chemical bonds, why twisted bilayer graphene becomes a superconductor at exactly 1.1 degrees, and how sometimes the best career path is the one where you take the only offer you get.

About the Guest
Fang Liu is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University, where her lab develops scalable methods for creating and studying two-dimensional materials and their artificial structures. She invented a gold-based exfoliation technique during her postdoctoral work at Columbia University that enables the production of large-scale, high-quality moiré superlattices, millimeters to centimeters in size, with nearly perfect yield. She received her B.S. in Chemistry from Peking University in Beijing in 2010, her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015 (where she studied photochemistry of Criegee intermediates and atmospheric radicals under Prof. Marsha Lester), and was a DOE postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Xiaoyang Zhu's group at Columbia University from 2016 to 2020, where she switched fields from gas-phase spectroscopy to solid-state 2D materials. Her research uses ultrafast spectroscopy, electron diffraction, and light-induced control to explore quantum properties in twisted materials, with recent work (published in Nature in 2023) demonstrating photo-induced twisting motion in moiré superlattices. Before joining Stanford in 2020, she applied to 92 universities for faculty positions.

Connect with Fang
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fang-liu-b58ba717/

Chapters
00:00 – Cold Open: Invisibility Suits and Moiré Magic
01:19 – Meet Fang Liu
01:45 – Two-Dimensional Materials: Solids One Atom Thick
08:26 – Building Devices at the Atomic Scale
14:21 – How to Make a Monolayer: Top-Down vs Bottom-Up
17:39 – The Nobel Prize Technique: Scotch Tape Exfoliation
19:52 – Gold Exfoliation: A Better Way
23:31 – The Physics of Adhesion: Not Quite a Bond, Not Quite van der Waals
28:06 – Moiré Superlattices: When Two Layers Twist
35:18 – Scaling Up: Centimeter-Scale Structures
38:41 – Ultrafast Spectroscopy: Watching Atoms Move in Real Time
45:06 – Photo-Induced Twist: Light Makes Lattices Dance
52:38 – How She Got Into Chemistry: The Lowest Score Threshold
1:00:17 – Switching Fields and Landing at Stanford

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Connect with Dr. Aaron Winkler

• Website: www.aaronwinklermd.com
• LinkedIn: @NRTGEPOD
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