View the video
above to hear more about the new material discovered by Menon
that could upstage
graphene. Video by REVEAL Research Media.
(February 29, 2016) A
new one atom-thick flat material that could upstage the wonder material
graphene and advance digital technology has been discovered by a physicist at
the University of Kentucky working in collaboration with scientists from
Daimler in Germany and the Institute for Electronic Structure and Laser (IESL)
in Greece.
The atoms in the
new structure are arranged in a hexagonal pattern as in graphene, but that
is where the
similarity ends. The three elements forming the new material all have different
sizes; the bonds
connecting the atoms are also different. As a result, the sides of the
hexagons formed
by these atoms are unequal, unlike in graphene.
Reported in Physical Review B, Rapid Communications, the new
material is made up of silicon, boron and nitrogen — all light, inexpensive and
earth abundant elements — and is extremely stable, a property many other
graphene alternatives lack.
"We used simulations to see if the bonds would break or
disintegrate — it didn't happen," said Madhu Menon, a physicist in the UK
Center for Computational Sciences. "We heated the material up to
1,000-degree Celsius and it still didn't break."
Image courtesy
of Madhu Menon
Using state-of-the-art theoretical computations, Menon and
his collaborators Ernst Richter from Daimler and a former UK Department of
Physics and Astronomy post-doctoral research associate, and Antonis Andriotis
from IESL, have demonstrated that by combining the three elements, it is
possible to obtain a one atom-thick, truly 2D material with properties that can
be fine-tuned to suit various applications beyond what is possible with
graphene.