Skip to main content

Two-dimensional materials 'as revolutionary as graphene'

Extremely thin stacks of two-dimensional materials, which could deliver applications fine-tuned to the demands of industry, are set to revolutionise the world in the same way that graphene will.
Writing in Science, leading 2D materials researchers estimate that research on combining materials of just a few atomic layers in stacks called heterostructures is at the same stage that graphene was 10 years ago, and can expect the same rapid progress graphene has experienced.
Graphene was the first 2D material, isolated at The University of Manchester in 2004. Its range of superlative properties, including fantastic strength, conductivity, flexibility and transparency, has paved the way for applications ranging from water filtration to bendable smartphones; from rust-proof coatings to anti-cancer drug delivery systems.
Combining graphene with other materials, which individually have excellent characteristics complimentary to the extraordinary properties of graphene, has resulted in exciting scientific developments and could produce applications as yet beyond our imagination.
The authors of the review article, from The University of Manchester and National University of Singapore, state that early applications could be high-mobility transistors for superfast electronics and LED devices using graphene as a transparent electrode.
However, such in the range of possible combinations of materials, researchers believe that heterostructures could deliver , made to order to meet the demands of industry.
The family of 2D crystals is expanding all the time, meaning that new possibilities for combining them in stacks can be explored.
The next challenge is to work out how to mass produce 2D materials; a similar problem that faced graphene in the early years after it was isolated.
Sir Kostya Novoselov, who together with Professor Sir Andre Geim won the Nobel prize for Physics in 2010 for demonstrating the remarkable properties of graphene, believes 2D materials are one of the most exciting and promising areas of research.
He said: "With 2D materials, we are currently where we were about 10 years ago with graphene – plenty of interesting  and unclear prospects for mass production.
"Given the fast progress of graphene technology over the past few years, we can expect similar advances in the production of heterostructures, making the science and applications more achievable."
Co-author Professor Antonio Castro Neto, Director of the Centre for Advanced 2D Materials at the National University of Singapore, added: "In the search for revolutionary and disruptive new technologies, van der Waals heterostructures and devices based on two dimensional materials emerge as major players.
"This review covers the latest developments in one of the fastest growing fields that bridges science,  science, and engineering."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This strange mineral grows on dead bodies and turns them blue

If you were to get up close and personal with Ötzi the Iceman – the 5,000-year-old mummy of a  tattooed ,  deep-voiced  man who died and was frozen in the Alps – you’d notice that his skin is flecked with tiny bits of blue. At first, it would appear that these oddly bluish crystal formations embedded in his skin are from freezing to death or some other sort of trauma, but it’s actually a mineral called  vivianite  (or blue ironstone) and it happens to form quite often on corpses left in iron-rich environments. For Ötzi, the patches of vivianite are  from him resting  near rocks with flecks of iron in them, but other cases are way more severe. According to Chris Drudge at Atlas Obscura , a man named John White was buried in a cast iron coffin back in 1861. During those days, coffins often had a window for grieving family members to peer inside even if the lid was closed during the funeral. Sometime after he was buried, that window broke, allowing groundwater to come inside the
Post a Comment
Read more

It's Official: Time Crystals Are a New State of Matter, and Now We Can Create Them

Peer-review has spoken. Earlier this year , physicists had put together a blueprint for how to make and measure time crystals - a bizarre state of matter with an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, allowing them to maintain constant oscillation without energy. Two separate research teams managed to create what looked an awful lot like time crystals  back in January,  and now both experiments have successfully passed peer-review for the first time, putting the 'impossible' phenomenon squarely in the realm of reality. "We've taken these theoretical ideas that we've been poking around for the last couple of years and actually built it in the laboratory,"  says one of the researchers , Andrew Potter from Texas University at Austin. "Hopefully, this is just the first example of these, with many more to come." Time crystals  are one of the coolest things physics has dished up in recent months, because they point to a
Post a Comment
Read more

The Dark Side Of The Love Hormone Oxytocin

New research shows oxytocin isn't the anti-anxiety drug we thought it was. Oxytocin, the feel-good bonding hormone released by physical contact with another person, orgasm and childbirth (potentially encouraging  monogamy ), might have a darker side. The  love drug  also plays an important role in intensifying  negative emotional memories  and increasing feelings of fear in future stressful situations, according to a new study. Two experiments performed with mice found that the hormone activates a signaling molecule called extracellular-signal-related kinases (ERK), which has been associated with the way the brain  forms memories   of fear . According to Jelena Radulovic, senior author on the study and a professor at Northwestern University's medical school, ERK stimulates fear pathways in the brain's lateral septum, the region with the highest levels of oxytocin. Mice without oxytocin receptors and mice with even more oxytocin receptors than usual were placed in
Post a Comment
Read more