Carbon nanomaterials have captured the research community’s attention over the past several decades with materials such as buckyballs, carbon nanotubes, carbon nanofibers and graphene. Graphene has brought to the world’s attention the exceptional properties of two-dimensional (2D) nanosheet materials. Due to its exceptional transport, mechanical and thermal properties, graphene has been at the forefront of nanomaterials research over the past few years. Its development has enabled researchers to explore other 2D layered materials, such as the transition metal dichalcogenides, a wide variety of oxides and nitrides and clays. Graphene has a major problem for novel 2D semiconductor applications as it lacks an energy gap between its conduction and valence bands, which makes it difficult to achieve low power dissipation in the OFF state. It therefore requires extensive modification (strain or other gap-opening engineering) to create one.
Researchers have therefore looked beyond graphene in recent years to other layered 2D materials, such as molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) and phosphorene. These materials possess the intrinsic properties of graphene, such as high electrical conductivity, insulating and semi-conducting properties, high thermal conductivity, high mechanical strength, gas diffusion barriers, high chemical stability and radiation shielding, but crucially also possess a semiconductor band gap. Theoretical and experimental works on these materials have rapidly increased in the past couple of years.
In this issue
- Special in-depth focus on 2D Materials beyond graphene.
- All the latest graphene product, production and funding news.
Published February 2018, 21 pages
