New material shares many of graphene’s unusual properties
Graphene, a single-atom-thick layer of carbon, has spawned much research into its unique electronic, optical and mechanical properties. Now, researchers at MIT have found another compound that shares many of graphene’s unusual characteristics — and in some cases has interesting complementary properties to this much-heralded material.The material, a thin film of bismuth-antimony, can have a variety of different controllable characteristics, the researchers found, depending on the ambient temperature and pressure, the material’s thickness and the orientation of its growth. The research, carried out by materials science and engineering PhD candidate Shuang Tang and Institute Professor Mildred Dresselhaus, appears in the journal Nano Letters.Like graphene, the new material has electronic properties that are known as two-dimensional Dirac cones, a term that refers to the cone-shaped graph plotting energy versus momentum for electrons moving through the material. These unusual properties — which allow electrons to move in a different way than is...