If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then graphene is basking in admiration. Several labs are recreating the six-fold geometry of the carbon-based material with a range of building blocks, hoping to match — if not surpass — graphene’s fascinating properties.
The approaches span a range of length scales, from nanometres to millimetres (see ‘Lattice lookalikes’), and take advantage of a variety of construction techniques, including potassium atoms trapped by laser beams, hexagons etched on a gallium arsenide surface and microwaves pumped into a honeycomb arrangement of ceramic cylinders. The research is mostly motivated by curiosity, and few think that any of the ‘artificial graphenes’ will be used in applications. But the new materials show that hexagonal patterns are worth investigating. “It’s clear the physics in electrons in graphene is very attractive,” says Eros Mariani, a theoretical physicist at the University of Exeter, UK.
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