Nanomaterial outsmarts ions
Tuesday, April 22, 2014 - 09:30
in Physics & Chemistry
Ions are an essential tool in chip manufacturing, but these electrically charged atoms can also be used to produce nano-sieves with homogeneously distributed pores. A particularly large number of electrons, however, must be removed from the atoms for this purpose. Such highly charged ions either lose a surprisingly large amount of energy or almost no energy at all as they pass through a membrane that measures merely one nanometer in thickness. Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) report in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters that this discovery is an important step towards developing novel types of electronic components made of graphene.