Silicon has long been the king of the semiconductor industry, providing the backbone of almost all computing technology. But now, researchers have created a functional semiconductor from a rival material: graphene.
In its natural form, graphene is a semimetal, not a semiconductor. By growing the material in a regular lattice on a silicon carbide face, the researchers were able to create a material with a band gap, giving it the ability to switch on and off in the presence of an electric field.
“The graphene is bonded to the silicon carbide in a very regular way, and that complete, regular crystal structure gives it its high mobility,” or the ability for electrons to move freely, says Walt de Heer, a physicist at Georgia Institutute of Technology and senior author of a new article describing the material in the journal Nature.
According to de Heer, the two-dimensional (2D) graphene is extremely strong, and its high mobility means that electrons can move through it without heating up the material. A further advantage of graphene over silicon is that it has quantum mechanical properties that may prove promising in the development of quantum computing.
Developing the material took years. Initially, de Heer and his team were...
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