Atom-thick sheets unlock future technologies

A new way of splitting layered materials, similar to graphite, into sheets of material just one atom thick could lead to revolutionary new electronic and energy storage technologies. An international team, led by Oxford University and Trinity College Dublin scientists, has invented a versatile method for creating these one-atom thick ‘nanosheets’ from a range of materials using mild ultrasonic pulses, like those generated by jewellery cleaning devices, and common solvents. The new method is simple, fast, and inexpensive, and could be scaled up to work on an industrial scale.

* Each one-millimetre-thick layer of graphite is made up of around three million layers of graphene – a flat sheet of carbon one atom thick – stacked one on top of the other. “Because of its extraordinary electronic properties graphene has been getting all the attention, including a recent Nobel Prize, as physicists hope that it might, one day, compete with silicon in electronics,’ said Dr Valeria Nicolosi of Oxford University’s Department of Materials, who led the research with Professor Jonathan Coleman of Trinity College Dublin. “But in fact there are hundreds of other layered materials that could enable us to create powerful new technologies. Our new method offers low-costs, a very high yield and a very large throughput: within a couple of hours, and with just 1 mg of material, billions and billions of one-atom-thick graphene-like nanosheets can be made at the same time from a wide variety of exotic layered materials,” Dr Nicolosi added.

Professor Coleman, of Trinity College Dublin, said: “These novel materials have chemical and electronic properties which are well suited for applications in new electronic devices, super-strong composite materials and energy generation and storage. In particular, this research represents a major breakthrough towards the development of efficient thermoelectric materials.” *Report in Science. Oxford Brookes University.