The discovery was reported in a paper published in Physical Review B.
By Dileep Thekkethil
An Indian origin researcher has developed a new one-atom flat material that could replace graphene allowing the material to be used in advanced digital technology.
Madhu Menon, a physicist at the University of Kentucky in the US discovered the new advanced material, which is a combination of silicon, boron and nitrogen, all cheaply available elements. According to Menon, the new material that he has found is stable and has properties that graphene doesn’t possess.
Menon, a physicist in the centre for computational sciences said “We used simulations to see if the bonds would break or disintegrate – it didn’t happen. We heated the material up to 1,000-degree celsius and it still didn’t break.”
The discovery was reported in a paper published in Physical Review B.
Menon along with his team of scientists have successfully demonstrated that the material obtained by fusing three elements (silicon, boron and nitrogen), is a one-atom-thick 2D material that can be fine-tuned to suit various high-end technologies, which the normal graphene cannot support.
Menon worked with his colleagues Ernst Richter from Daimler in Germany and Antonis Andriotis from Institute for Electronic Structure and Laser (IESL) in Greece to make this stunning discovery.
Till now, graphene was considered the strongest material in the world but the downside of the material was that it could not be used for advanced technologies such as semiconductors. This was a major disappointment for the digital technology industry.
According to Menon, the three elements used to make the new material has different sizes and the way they are connected to the atoms are also different from the usual graphene. This enables the unequal atoms to align in a hexagon shape.
Menon also added that the new material is metallic but the new properties of it allow it to be used for semiconducting by fusing other elements to the top of the silicon atoms. “We know that silicon-based technology is reaching its limit because we are putting more and more components together and making electronic processors more and more compact,” Menon said adding “but we know that this cannot go on indefinitely; we need smarter materials.”
“The ultimate test of any theory is experimental verification, so the sooner the better!” Menon added in the paper.
The researchers are of the belief that the new finding will pave the way for the mineral science to explore into the functional flexibility and new properties for new applications.