Ions are an essential tool in chip manufacturing, but these
electrically charged atoms can also be used to produce nano-sieves with
homogeneously distributed pores. A particularly large number of electrons,
however, must be removed from the atoms for this purpose. Such highly charged
ions either lose a surprisingly large amount of energy or almost no energy at
all as they pass through a membrane that measures merely one nanometer in
thickness. Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and
Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) report in the scientific journal
Physical Review Letters that this discovery is an important step towards
developing novel types of electronic components made of graphene