Molybdenum trioxide, or α-MoO3, has potential for use in lithium ion batteries and electrochromic devices, such as smart windows. A team of scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, or PNNL, EMSL and the University of Wyoming have developed a reproducible method for growing α-MoO3 sheets down to a monolayer in thickness. They used a thin-film deposition technique, molecular beam epitaxy at EMSL, to synthesize α-MoO3. Ultra-thin α-MoO3 has also demonstrated its potential use in thin-film pseudocapacitors, light-emitting diodes, plasmon resonance generators and biosensors. The team published their results the scientific journal Nanoscale.
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Reference: Du Y, G Li, EW Peterson, J Zhou, X Zhang, R Mu, Z Dohnalek, ME Bowden, I Lyubinetsky, and SA Chambers. 2016. "Iso-oriented Monolayer α-MoO3(010) Films Epitaxially Grown on SrTiO3(001)." Nanoscale 8:3119-3124. DOI: 10.1039/C5NR07745A.