Graphene’s ‘Big Mac’ means silicon may have had its chips

SCIENTISTS at the University of Manchester have come one step closer to creating the next generation of computer chips using graphene material.

Graphene is the world’s thinnest, strongest and most conductive material, which was discovered in 2004 at the University of Manchester by Nobel Prize winners Professor Andre Geim and Professor Kostya Novoselov.

It has the potential to revolutionize material science, and just last week Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announced plans for a £50m graphene research hub to be set up.

The University of Manchester team working on the commercialisation of graphene have demonstrated how it will probably look like within electronic circuits in a paper submitted to Nature Physics magazine.

It said that by sandwiching two sheets of graphene with another two-dimensional material, boron nitrate, a graphene ‘Big Mac’ can be created – a four-layered structure which could become key to replacing the silicon chip in computers.

The article stated that since there are two layers of graphene surrounded by the boron nitrate, researchers have been able to observe how graphene behaves when unaffected by the environment.

Dr Leonid Ponomarenko, the leading author on the paper, said: “Creating the multilayer structure has allowed us to isolate graphene from negative influence of the environment and control graphene’s electronic properties in a way that was impossible before.

“So far, people have never seen graphene as an insulator unless it has been purposefully damaged, but here high-quality graphene becomes an insulator for the first time.”

The layers of boron nitrate are used not only to separate two graphene layers but also to see how graphene reacts when it is completely encapsulated by another material.

Professor Geim said: “We are constantly looking at new ways of demonstrating and improving the remarkable properties of graphene.”

“Leaving the new physics we report aside, technologically important is our demonstration that graphene encapsulated within boron nitride offers the best and most advanced platform for future graphene electronics.

“It solves several nasty issues about graphene’s stability and quality that were hanging for a long time as dark clouds over the future road for graphene electronics.

“We did this on a small scale but the experience shows that everything with graphene can be scaled up.

“It could be only a matter of several months before we have encapsulated graphene transistors with characteristics better than previously demonstrated.”

Graphene is a novel two-dimensional material which can be seen as a monolayer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice.

Its properties could potentially lead to bendy, touchscreen phones and computers, lighter aircraft, wallpaper-thin HD TV sets and superfast internet connections.