A thin film is a layer of material in the range of nanometers (monolayer) to several micrometers in thickness. The controlled synthesis of thin-film materials displays a fundamental step in many different applications based on the thickness, geometry, and structure of the produced film. The properties of thin films can particularly be controlled by the thickness parameter. Thin films are formed mostly by deposition, either physical or chemical methods, resulting in both crystalline and amorphous materials, which have immense importance in the age of high technology. The electrical and mechanical properties of thin films often differ from those of the bulk materials, which can be partially explained by the nanostructure of thin films and the fact that these films are attached to a specifically chosen substrate.

Two-dimensional (2D) materials are crystals with a thickness of only one or very few atoms. These material class have layer-depending properties, which

attracted extensive interest due to its excellent properties such as high mobility, high conductivity, and high mechanical strength, and long spin diffusion length for spintronics devices. 2D materials are nanostructured low-dimensional materials with great potential in fabricating the next generation of electronics, optoelectronics devices as well as (bio)sensors. The most prominent example is graphene, which has attracted substantial attention and led to extensive study in physics, materials, nano-engineering due to its extraordinary electrical. Beyond the single element 2D material graphene, a lot of binary compounds like hexa-boron nitrate (h-BN), transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDC, e.g. MoS/Se₂, WS/Se₂, TiS/Se₂, SnS/Se₂) and monochalcogenides (MC, e.g. GeS, SnS) enjoy increasing interest in material science. The stacking of these mono-layers of different 2D materials enables combining and tuning of layer-depending properties, resulting in heterostructures with unique properties for a huge application field.

The fabrication of thin films and 2D materials synthesized by classical multi-source approaches as well as single-source approaches, using in-house designed molecular complexes, is in the big interest of Mathurs´ research field.