Researchers at Columbia Engineering, experts at manipulating matter at the nanoscale, have made an important breakthrough in physics and materials science, recently reported in Nature Nanotechnology. Working with colleagues from Princeton and Purdue Universities and Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, the team has engineered "artificial graphene" by recreating, for the first time, the electronic structure of graphene in a semiconductor device.
"This milestone defines a new state-of-the-art in condensed matter science and nanofabrication," says Aron Pinczuk, professor of applied physics and physics at Columbia Engineering and senior author of the study. "While artificial graphene has been demonstrated in other systems such as optical, molecular, and photonic lattices, these platforms lack the versatility and potential offered by semiconductor processing technologies. Semiconductor artificial graphene devices could be platforms to explore new types of electronic switches, transistors with superior properties, and even, perhaps, new ways of storing information based on exotic quantum mechanical states."