Artistic impression of the Hofstadter butterfly effect in graphene/boron nitride heterostructures exposed to a magnetic field; courtesy of Columbia University
Combining black and white graphene can change the electronic properties of the one-atom thick material, researchers have found. Writing , an international team including Lancaster University shows that the electronic properties of graphene change dramatically if graphene is placed on top of boron nitride, also known as 'white graphite'. The researchers include Professor Vladimir Falko and Dr Xi Chen from Lancaster University with Dr Leonid Ponomarenko who is based at both Manchester and Lancaster . The team is led by Nobel Laureate Sir Andre Geim and Dr Artem Mishchenko from the University of Manchester. One of the major challenges for using graphene in electronics applications is the absence of a band gap, which basically means that graphene's electrical conductivity cannot be switched off completely. Whatever researchers tried to do with the material so far, it remained highly electrically conductive. A new direction that has recently emerged in graphene research is to try to modify graphene's electronic properties by combining it with other similar materials in multilayered stacks.
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