An interdisciplinary team of scientists at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Electronics Science and Technology and Materials Science and Technology Divisions, has demonstrated hyperthermal ion implantation (HyTII) as an effective means of substitutionally doping graphene -- a hexagonally-arranged single-atomic thickness carbon sheet -- with nitrogen atoms. The result is a low-defect film with a tunable bandstructure amenable to a variety of device platforms and applications.
The research shows that the HyTII method delivers a high degree of control including doping concentration and, for the first time, demonstrates depth control of implantation by doping a single monolayer of graphene in a bilayer graphene stack. This further demonstrates that the resulting films have high-quality electronic transport properties that can be described solely by changes in bandstructure rather than the defect-dominated behavior of graphene films doped or functionalized using other methods.
This is one of the issues that has hindered graphene from becoming a major prime time player in the materials world. Looks like they may have solved it. To read more, click here.