Abstract
Graphene and 2D materials have already taken a firm place in research, development and applications. A number of exciting phenomena have been discovered in these crystals and they continue to bring exciting results on a regular basis. Still, the most important characteristic about 2D materials is that they offer a possibility to form on-demand van der Waals heterostructures, where individual 2D crystals are stacked together, forming a novel, 3D structure, whose composition can be controlled with atomic precision. This has opened up a new direction of research of materials on demand. Furthermore, since individual components in such heterostructures interact through a number of channels (elastic, van der Waals, electronic, etc.) – a degenerate energy landscape is formed, leading to a number of competing phases, which opens a way to engineer particular phase transitions between different states and, thus, study also the out-of-equilibrium phenomena in such structures.