A little twist with big consequences

摘要

Graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms, is thought to be one of the most promising materials for future semiconductor electronic devices, partly because of its extraordinarily high conductivity (carrier mobility). However, a key problem is that graphene has no bandgap, the defining feature of a semiconductor. Therefore, much effort has recently gone into engineering such a bandgap using different strategies. This is not an easy task, as the electronic structure should be changed sufficiently to generate a bandgap, but not so much that the promising electronic properties of graphene are lost.