Researchers at the Georgia Tech MRSEC for advanced electronic materials have demonstrated for the first time that an "effectively" isolated graphene sheet exists. Scientist around the globe have been searching for this idealized material for more than 4 years because they believe this form of carbon is the replacement material for current Si-CMOS chips. The GT team has demonstrated that the unexpected material is a multilayer, rotationally faulted, graphene stack grown on the carbon terminated face of SiC. The GT team suspected that the rotational stacking would electronically decouple graphene sheets in the stack, effectively making each sheet electronically isolated from the others. The figure above show the idealized linear energy dispersion (Dirac Cones) of this multilayer stack measured by angle resolved photoemission. This new material opens the way for a cheap scalable route to graphene electronics that will surpass silicon electronic devices.
