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Scientists have made the perfect semiconductor from graphene

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In the course of the experiments, scientists found out that graphene can be used to make an ideal semiconductor with increased permeability to infrared and visible light.

And for this you just need to glue it with another two-dimensional material, realized from tungsten, oxygen and selenium. This discovery and its excellent prospects will be discussed in this material.

AP Photo / Ted S. Warren
AP Photo / Ted S. Warren
AP Photo / Ted S. Warren

Graphene and its unique properties

As you know, graphene is a special kind of carbon, which is a material one atom thick. At the same time, the carbon atoms in graphene are linked in such a way, in structure strongly resembling a honeycomb.

Subsequent experiments with the material showed that graphene has many, both quite useful and interfering with the use of this material in electronics.

For example, graphene lacks a "forbidden band", which prevents it from being used as a semiconductor in modern electronics.

Many scientists around the world are trying to eliminate this shortcoming, trying to add various impurities to the material. Yes, this allows you to transform graphene into a semiconductor, but the distribution of "additives" is extremely uneven.

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For this reason, the thus obtained graphene semiconductor cannot be used for mass production of electronics due to the extremely high costs of its production.

A simple way to get a graphene semiconductor

The ideal crystal structure of graphene is a hexagonal crystal lattice. Author: AlexanderAlUS - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php? curid = 11294534
The ideal crystal structure of graphene is a hexagonal crystal lattice. Author: AlexanderAlUS - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php? curid = 11294534

Engineers at Columbia University (USA) decided to go the other way and decided to combine a graphene sheet with other one-dimensional materials and see what happens.

So the decision was made to combine graphene with a sheet made of tungsten, selenium and oxygen. As a result of such a merger, scientists recorded a change in the electrical properties of graphene.

Inside it, the so-called "holes" (areas with a positive charge) have formed, which is typical for semiconductor materials.

And as the measurements showed, these "holes" were perfectly distributed over the entire area of ​​contact of two one-dimensional materials. In addition, it turned out to be possible to control both the properties and the number of "holes" by simply changing the distance between the plates.

Scientists also found that the graphene semiconductor obtained in this way also became more permeable to infrared radiation and the visible spectrum of light.

The scientists shared the results of the work done on the pages of the journal Nature Electronics.

The discovered properties and simplicity of obtaining a graphene semiconductor opens up broad prospects for its use in various components of optical communication systems and in future light computers.

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