Graphene: Perfection is futile

The hexagon lattice is characteristic of graphene, the wave symbolizes the movement of the electrons The carbon material graphene has excellent electronic properties. But are they also stable enough to be useful in practice? Calculations from TU Wien say: Yes. Nothing in the world is perfect. This is also true in materials research. In computer simulations, one often represents a system in a highly idealized way; for example, one calculates the properties that an absolutely perfect crystal would have. In practice, however, we always have to deal with additional effects - with defects in the crystal lattice, with additional particles that attach to the material, with complicated interactions between the particles. The crucial question is therefore: Do these unavoidable additional effects change the material properties or not? This is particularly interesting in the case of the two-dimensional material graphene, which consists of only a single layer of carbon atoms.