Graphene breakthrough paves way for next generation electronic circuits

By sandwiching two sheets of graphene, the world's thinnest, strongest and most conductive material, with another two dimensional material, boron nitrate, the team have developed a four layered structure which could be the key to replacing silicon chips in computers. Because there are two layers of graphene completely surrounded by boron nitrate, the researchers have been able to observe how graphene behaves when unaffected by the environment and how it reacts when encapsulated by another material. Researcher, Dr Leonid Ponomarenko, said: "Creating the multilayer structure has allowed us to isolate graphene from the negative influence of the environment and control graphene's electronic properties in a way it 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 announcement follows Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne's pledge of £50million into graphene research. Professor Andre Geim, one of the researchers who discovered the material in 2004, said the funding would enable the hub to continue looking at new ways of demonstrating and improving its properties. "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," he said. "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 months before we have encapsulated graphene transistors with characteristics better than previously demonstrated."