After the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to two scientists in 2010 who had studied the material graphene, this substance has received a lot of attention. Together with colleagues from Korea, Dr. Frederik Wolff-Fabris from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has now developed and analyzed a material which possesses physical properties similar to graphene ("Anisotropic Dirac Fermions in a Bi Square Net of SrMnBi2").
Its structure also resembles iron pnictides, i.e. high temperature superconductors, and it definitely has a promising future: Due to the position of the individual components in the Periodic Table of Elements, some of the atoms can simply be replaced by foreign atoms. This creates new materials which can be superconductive, magnetic, or behave like topological insulators.
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