The development of 2D materials such as graphene, hexagonal boron nitride, transition metal dichalcogenides and other emerging systems toward applications has motivated a strong focus on producing materials with predictable, uniform properties across macroscopic length scales. This trend is supported by progress in synthesis, novel metrology tools, and the demonstration of device concepts that take advantage of uniform materials characteristics across ever-larger scales. On the other hand, there is increasing interest in exploring – and possibly controlling and exploiting – unique local properties resulting from imperfections in heterogeneous 2D materials, such as defects, pores, edges and grain boundaries, as well as engineered interfaces in heterostructures.

This symposium focuses on the tension between these two different viewpoints. By contrasting the latest results on large-scale homogeneous 2D materials and their applications with predictions and demonstrations of novel effects that arise at the nanoscale in heterogeneous 2D systems, it provides a forum for cross-fertilization and sharing of ideas, concepts, methods, and skills between experts in materials synthesis and processing, characterization, spatially resolved measurements, as well as theory and computation.