Graphene, made of a singular – atom thick sheet of carbon, stays much cooler and can conduct much faster, but it must be into tiny pieces, known as nanoribbons, in order to function as a semiconductor. Despite amazing progress in the engineering and characterization of nanoribbons, cleanly shifting them onto surfaces employed chip manufacturing has been a major challenge.
A current research conducted by scientists at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois and the Department of chemistry at the University of Nebraska Lincoln has illustrated the primary vital step toward integrating atomically accurate graphene nanoribbons onto non-metallic substrates.
Graphene nanoribbons estimate only numerous nanometers across, beyond the limits of traditional chip top-down patterning employed in chip manufacturing. As a result, when crafted from bigger pieces of graphene by numerous nanofabrication approaches, graphene nanoribbons are neither uniform nor narrow enough to showcase the desired semiconductor features.
“When you are going from the top-down, it is extremely hard to get control over the dimensions. It turns out that if the width transforms by just an atom or two, the features alter significantly,” says Adrian Radocea, a doctoral student in Beckman’s Nanoelectronics and Nanomaterials Group.
Ultimately, the nanoribbons must be prepared from the bottom up, from smaller molecules to prepare atomically accurate nanoribbons with exceedingly uniform electrical properties. “It is similar to molecular building blocks, sort of snapping legs together to building something,” says Radocea. ‘They lock in place and you end you end up with the precise control over the ribbon width.”
The basic approach was first revealed for graphene nanoribbons by illustrating the growth of atomically accurate graphene nanoribbons on metallic substrates. In 2014, the research team of Alexander Sinitskil at the University of Nebraska Lincoln introduced a substituting approach for making atomically accurate precise graphene nanoribbons in solution.
“The conventionally illustrated synthesis on metallic substrates yields graphene nanoribbons of exceedingly high-quality, but their number is quite small, as the growth is constrained to the precious surface of metal,” says Sinitskii, an associate lecturer of chemistry at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an author of the study. “It is difficult to scale such synthesis up. In contrast, when nanoribbons are synthesized in the free 3-dimensional solution environment, they can be generated in big quantities.”
“Atomically accurate graphene nanoribbons are serious candidates for the post-silicon era when traditional silicon transistor scaling fails,” says Lyding. “This illustrates the primary vital step toward integrating APGNRs with technologically relevant silicon substrates.” “I found this project extremely exciting because you are building things with atomic level control, so you try to place every atom precisely where you want it to go,” says Radocea
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