Tellurene

Also called 2D tellurium

nanosheet semiconductor

Not a layered material in the usual sense: tellurium is built from spiral chains, and a ‘sheet’ is a flat bundle of them. Grown from solution, these sheets are air-stable p-type semiconductors with high hole mobility that can be made cheaply at low temperature – a practical advantage most 2D semiconductors lack.

Cell: Rectangular, a = 4.46 Å (across chains), b = 5.93 Å (along chains)
Atoms per cell: 3
Te–Te bond: 2.83 Å
Height: 2.03 Å between the outer atom centres

Tellurium atoms bond into helical chains, three atoms to a turn, and the chains pack side by side held only by van der Waals forces. Tellurene flakes lie with the chains in the plane, and this model shows the thinnest such slice – a single sheet of parallel helices. Real flakes are many sheets thick, and whether the helices turn left or right is fixed by which of two mirror-image crystals they come from. One sheet of chains from bulk trigonal tellurium (Cherin and Unger, Acta Crystallographica 23, 670, 1967; COD 2310839): chains 4.46 Å apart and 5.93 Å per turn.

Data sheet

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Kind of sheet: nanosheet
Made by chemistry or cut from a solid, not peeled as a clean crystal layer
Behaves as: semiconductor
Band gap: ~0.33 eV in bulk (direct, at H), rising to around 1 eV for a predicted monolayer

In colour: this family, 0.33–1 eV. In grey: the other 39 families on the catalogue’s chart, each at the middle of its range.
Thickness: Solution-grown flakes typically 10–100 nm; few-nanometre flakes reported
Structure: Helical chains of tellurium atoms, covalently bonded along the chain and held together side by side by van der Waals forces; 2D flakes lie with the chains in-plane (trigonal, P3₁21 or P3₂21 depending on handedness)
Space group: Te: bulk P3₁21
Bulk: the Materials Project crystal linked below
Stability: Air-stable compared with most Xenes; oxidation is limited to a thin surface layer.
First made: Epitaxial few-layer tellurium reported in 2017; solution-grown 2D tellurium transistors in 2018 (Wang and colleagues, Purdue)
Materials Project: Te
Computed crystal structure and properties

Compare with other materials

Key properties

Hole mobility of ~700 cm²/(V·s) at room temperature in solution-grown flakes
Chiral structure: left- and right-handed chains produce strong optical and electrical anisotropy
Good air stability without encapsulation
Hydrothermal growth at ~180 °C, compatible with flexible substrates and back-end-of-line thermal budgets

How it is made

Hydrothermal synthesis with polyvinylpyrrolidone as a shape-directing agent – large flakes up to ~100 µm
Thermal evaporation and physical vapour deposition – wafer-scale films at low temperature
Van der Waals epitaxy on graphite, graphene or mica

Uses, and how close they are

p-type thin-film transistors for flexible and back-end-of-line electronicsprototype
Short-wave infrared photodetectorsprototype
Thermoelectrics and piezoelectric energy harvestinglab

Readiness runs lab → prototype → pilot → deployed.

Open problems

Can the mobility of solution-grown flakes be reproduced in uniform, thickness-controlled wafer-scale films?
Is tellurene a practical p-type partner for n-type TMDCs in complementary 2D logic?
How do chirality and spin–orbit coupling combine to produce the reported current-induced spin polarisation?

Going deeper

Short notes for specialists. Choose a lens in the header and yours comes first.

For theoreticians · your lens

Quasi-one-dimensional bonding means interchain coupling and thickness strongly affect the gap. Spin–orbit coupling and the chiral structure produce radial spin textures and Weyl points near H in the bulk. Include dispersion corrections and SOC, and treat chain orientation explicitly for anisotropic transport.

For experimentalists · your lens

Determine chain direction with polarisation-resolved Raman (E and A₁ modes near 92, 120 and 140 cm⁻¹) and SAED. Thin flakes cleave along the chain axis, so handle them gently.

For engineers · your lens

One of the more practical 2D semiconductors: low growth temperature, air stability and a p-type channel make it relevant for back-end-of-line thin-film transistors. Contact engineering and thickness uniformity are the remaining obstacles.

In the research tracks

Readiness assessments

2D devices in the back end of line and monolithic 3D circuits · TRL 3

Recent news

The newest items tagged Tellurene, from the news feed updated 5 Oct 2026.

Journal 3 Sep 2026 Physical Review B

Polar unidirectional magnetotransport in p-type tellurene from quantum geometry

Unidirectional magnetoresistance, or electric magnetochiral anisotropy (eMChA), is a nonlinear magnetotransport effect emerging in noncentrosymmetric conductors. This phenomenon manifests as a resistance R change proportional to the first power of both the electric current I and applied… [Phys. Rev. B 114, 165402]…

TheoryTellurene

Preprintnot yet peer reviewed 28 Aug 2026 arXiv

Engineering Excitons through Polymorphism and Dimensional Confinement in Low-Dimensional Tellurium

The interplay between dimensionality, band-edge electronic structure, and electron-hole interactions governs the optical response of low-dimensional tellurium, yet the microscopic origin of its excitonic behavior remains largely unexplored. Here, we investigate the quasiparticle, excitonic, and optical properties of…