Molybdenite, a mineral that's currently used as a lubricant, turns out to have extraordinary electronic properties when deposited in single-atom-thick strips. Researchers in Switzerland have now made high-performance transistors out of this form of molybdenite. Used in this way, the mineral could hold promise for more efficient flexible solar cells, electronics, or high-performance digital microprocessors.
Like graphene, an atom-thick form of carbon, "two-dimensional" molybdenite has electrical and optical properties that are much better than those found in three-dimensional forms of the material.
Researchers led by Andras Kis at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) made molybdenite transistors using methods used in the early days of graphene research. Molybdenite, a relatively inexpensive mineral of molybdenum disulfide, has a layered structure similar to that of raw graphite. Kis's group crushed crystals of molybdenite between folded pieces of tape, peeling back layer after layer until all that remained were single-atom-thick sheets. They then deposited the molybdenite sheets onto a substrate, added a layer of insulating material, and used standard lithography to add source and drain electrodes and a gate to make a transistor. Other researchers had done this before but didn't get good performance. Kis says the molybdenite transistors have a comparable electrical mobility to similar ones made from graphene nanoribbons.
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