An international team of scientists, led by Oxford University and Trinity College Dublin, has invented a new way of splitting layered materials into sheets of material just one atom thick, potentially leading to revolutionary new electronic and energy storage technologies. The new method is simple, fast and inexpensive, and can be used for creating “nanosheets” from a range of materials. According to Professor Jonathan Coleman of Trinity College Dublin, “[T]hese novel materials have chemical and electronic properties which are well suited for applications in new electronic devices, super-strong composite materials and energy generation and storage. In particular, this research represents a major breakthrough towards the development of efficient thermoelectric materials.” Researchers have been trying for decades to create nanosheets with exotic layered materials such as Boron Nitride, Molybdenum disulfide, and Tungsten disulfide, which have the potential to be metallic, semi-metallic, or semiconducting, depending on their chemical composition and how their atoms are arranged. Previous methods were time consuming and laborious, and often yielded materials that were fragile and unsuited to most applications. Dr. Valeria Nicolosi of Oxford University’s Department of Materials says “[O]ur new method offers low-costs, a very high yield and a very large throughput: within a couple of hours, and with just 1 mg of material, billions and billions of one-atom-thick graphene-like nanosheets can be made at the same time from a wide variety of exotic layered materials.” The team’s findings were published in the journal Science. The article can be viewed online at the link below.<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.ox.ac.uk\/media\/news_stories\/2011\/110204.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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