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• Industrial Leadership
• Advanced Materials, Manufacturing & Processing

A new material – discovered by a physicist at the University of Kentucky, US, in collaboration with scientists from Germany and Greece – with a thickness of a single atom could rival graphene as the next ‘wonder material’.

Composed of silicon, boron and nitrogen, all lightweight and earth abundant elements, the new material has the stability currently lacked by graphene.

Madhu Menon, a physicist at the University of Kentucky Center for Computational Sciences, said: “We used simulations to see if the bonds would break or disintegrate — it didn’t happen. We heated the material up to 1,000°C and it still didn’t break.”

Using theoretical computations, Menon and his collaborators (Daimler’s Ernst Richter and former University of Kentucky research associate Antonis Andriotis from IESL) have demonstrated that by combining the silicon, boron and nitrogen, it is possible to obtain a 2D material just one atom-thick, with adaptable properties for numerous applications beyond that which graphene is currently capable.

Whilst graphene is revolutionary in many functions, it remains unsuitable for use as a semiconductor, rendering it all but useless in the digital technology industry; hence the search for a 2D material that is suitable and the discovery of this new class of three-layer materials called transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs). These are semiconductors far more efficient than silicon, but much larger in size. Menon and his team studied various combinations of elements from the first and second row of the periodic table, finding that only one specific arrangement of silicon, boron and nitrogen resulted in a stable structure – hexagonally, similar to graphene.

“This discovery opens a new chapter in material science by offering new opportunities for researchers to explore functional flexibility and new properties for new applications,” Menon said. “We can expect some surprises.”