2D materials: introduction and market status

A new study from Queen Mary University of London finds that graphene is in fact a 3D material, as well as a 2D material. This Realization is said to be important for understanding its mechanical properties and for developing novel graphene-based devices.

In this study, the researchers asked two fundamental questions: to what extent is graphene graphite, and what is the true thickness of graphene? To their surprise, they found that 2D graphene, which is a flat single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb structure, has many of the same mechanical properties as 3D graphite, which is a naturally occurring form of carbon made up from a very weak stack of many layers of graphene. They show that graphene shares a similar resistance to compression as graphite and that it is significantly thicker than is widely believed.

Past studies by various research groups around the world were able to demonstrate origami-like folding of graphite with a scanning probe, but could not command where or how the folds would occur. Now, by replacing the graphite with high-quality graphene nanoislands, researchers in China and the US have leveraged the atomic-level control of STM into an origami nanofabrication tool with an impressive level of precision.

“Similar to conventional paper origami, our current work has made it possible to create new complex nanostructures by custom-design folding of atomic layer materials,” says Hong-Jun Gao, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) who led this latest work. Alongside Shixuan Du and collaborators at CAS, as well as Vanderbilt University and the University of Maryland in the U.S, Gao reports how they can fold single layers of graphene with the direction of the fold specified over a range from around the magic angle at 1.1° (where observations of correlated electron behavior have been causing such a stir) to 60°, with a precision of 0.1°. Their STM manipulations also leave tubular structures at the edges that have one-dimensional structure electron characteristics similar to carbon nanotubes.