Also called SnS, SnSe, GeS, GeSe, group-IV monochalcogenides
Phosphorene look-alikes made from tin or germanium with sulfur or selenium. Their lopsided structure makes even single layers ferroelectric – holding a switchable electric polarisation in the plane – and bulk SnSe set records as a thermoelectric, turning heat into electricity unusually efficiently.
Three layers of GeSe. Each layer is turned by 180° and shifted by half a cell in both directions against the one below, so every second layer repeats, 10.83 Å apart. The turned layers point their built-in polarisation in opposite directions, so bulk GeSe has an inversion centre while a single layer has none. Cell from Murgatroyd and colleagues, Chemistry of Materials (2020); COD 4003515.
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Ferroelectric double-well energetics and transition temperatures are sensitive to functional and to thermal fluctuations, so Monte Carlo or molecular dynamics on top of DFT are needed rather than static energy barriers. Strong anharmonicity explains SnSe’s low lattice thermal conductivity; the Pnma–Cmcm transition requires temperature-dependent effective potentials.
Interlayer bonding is stronger than in graphite, so tape exfoliation rarely yields monolayers – vapour deposition and MBE are more productive. Detect in-plane polarisation with piezoresponse force microscopy, SHG or STM-based spectroscopy, and determine armchair and zigzag axes with polarised Raman.
Bulk SnSe is a serious thermoelectric candidate built from abundant elements. The 2D ferroelectric and piezoelectric applications need thin-film growth with domain control before a meaningful engineering evaluation is possible.
The newest items tagged SnSe, GeSe, from the news feed updated 5 Oct 2026.
This work demonstrates that mechanical exfoliation induces measurable distortions in the van der Waals (vdW) gap of layered crystals, while the annealing process can reduce this distortion. Using x-ray diffraction, lattice parameters were compared in bulk and mechanically exfoliated flakes of selected transition metal…
Monolayer tin selenide (SnSe) exhibits phase-dependent anharmonic lattice dynamics, yet their consequences for the thermoelectric power factor (PF) and point-defect tolerance remain unresolved. We combine density functional theory, the stochastic self-consistent harmonic approximation (SSCHA), and Boltzmann transport…
Two-dimensional (2D) SnSe is an emerging 2D material exhibiting intriguing properties such as ferroelectricity and nonlinear optical response. Here, high-quality single-crystalline SnSe nanosheets were synthesized via NaCl-assisted chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method. The addition of NaCl was found to significantly…
The optical response of two-dimensional materials is often significantly impacted by excitonic effects due to the reduced screening of attractive Coulomb interactions in low-dimensional systems. Accurate modeling of exciton formation and real-time dynamics is essential to understanding their ultrafast optical…
Van der Waals (vdW) p-n heterojunctions are important building blocks for advanced electronics and optoelectronics, in which high-quality heterojunctions essentially determine device performances or functionalities. Creating tunable depletion regions with substantially suppressed leakage currents presents huge…
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