Serendipity has as much a place in science as in love.
(August 4, 2015) That’s
what Northeastern physicists Swastik Kar and Srinivas Sridhar found during
their four-year project to modify graphene, a stronger-than-steel
infinitesimally thin lattice of tightly packed carbon atoms. Primarily
funded by the Army Research Laboratory and Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, or DARPA, the researchers were charged with imbuing the
decade-old material with thermal sensitivity for use in infrared imaging
devices such as night-vision goggles for the military.
What they unearthed, published Friday in the journal
Science Advances, was so much more: an entirely new material spun out of
boron, nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen that shows evidence of magnetic, optical,
and electrical properties as well as DARPA’s sought-after thermal ones.
Its potential applications run the gamut: from 20-megapixel arrays for
cellphone cameras to photo detectors to atomically thin transistors that
when multiplied by the billions could fuel computers.
“We had to start from scratch and build everything,” says
Kar, an assistant professor of physics in the College of Science. “We were
on a journey, creating a new path, a new direction of research.”
The pair was familiar with “alloys,” controlled
combinations of elements that resulted in materials with properties that
surpassed graphene’s—for example, the addition of boron and nitrogen to
graphene’s carbon to connote the conductivity necessary to produce an
electrical insulator. But no one had ever thought of choosing oxygen to add
to the mix.