The 2-D material device designed and fabricated by Aalto University's researchers may prove useful in wearable electronics and sensors.
Graphene has been predicted to revolutionize electronics since Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov received the Nobel Prize in physics in 2010 for the breakthrough experiments conducted with the material.
Graphene is a so-called 2-D material, that is, it is only one atom thick film. Graphite, which is a well-known material, consists of huge number of graphene layers on top of each other. Despite being ultimately thin, graphene is an excellent conductor of electricity and heat, and it is extremely durable. However, its band gap is zero, which limits its application in some semiconductor applications as it results in low intrinsic on/off ratio. Now, Aalto University's researchers have managed to fabricate an electricity-conducting material combination with especially promising properties by merging graphene and another 2-D material, gallium selenide. In the semiconductor industry this kind of structure is known as a heterojunction. The results were recently published in the Advanced Materials science journal.
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