Artificial graphene, which has the potential to bring a future technological revolution, is already developing researchers abroad, with the contribution of Greek physicists.
Artificial graphene can lead to faster, smaller and lighter electronic and optical devices of various kinds, including better photovoltaics, lasers and LED lamps.
The researchers, led by Dr. Efterpi Kalesakis of the University of Luxembourg (Physics and Materials Science Research Unit), who made the relevant publication in the journal "Physical Review X", for the first time they succeeded in producing artificial graphene using traditional semiconductor materials.
The graphene, discovered by 2004, is considered a revolutionary material and consists of a hexagonal flat grid (like bee honey) of carbon atoms with only one person's thickness. It is a very powerful, flexible, translucent and semiconductor material with enormous potential for a variety of applications.
Artificial graphene has the same flat hexagonal structure as normal graphene, but instead of carbon atoms, it contains semiconductor crystals up to ten nanometers (billionths of a meter) thick. The material may have different properties, depending on the differences in size, shape and chemical composition of the nanocrystals it contains.
The said promising material is being developed in cooperation of the University of Luxembourg, the French Institute of Electronics, Microelectronics and Nanotechnologys (IEMN) in Lille (with which Efterpi Kalesaki also collaborates), the Dutch Institutes of Nanomaterials Science and Theoretical Physics of the University of Utrecht, as well as the German Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden.
"These self-organized nanoscale nanocrystals with a hexagonal flat structure are emerging as a new class of systems with great potential," said Kallesaki.
The Greek researcher graduated from 2007 from the Physics Department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, from where 2012 took her PhD.
Source: naftemporiki.gr
