A research team led by physicists at the University of California, Riverside has identified a property of "bilayer graphene" (BLG) that the researchers say is analogous to finding the Higgs boson in particle physics.
Graphene, nature's thinnest elastic material, is a one-atom thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. Because of graphene's planar and chicken wire-like structure, sheets of it lend themselves well to stacking.
BLG is formed when two graphene sheets are stacked in a special manner. Like graphene, BLG has high current-carrying capacity, also known as high electron conductivity. The high current-carrying capacity results from the extremely high velocities that electrons can acquire in a graphene sheet.
The physicists report online Jan. 22 in Nature Nanotechnology that in investigating BLG's properties they found that when the number of electrons on the BLG sheet is close to 0, the material becomes insulating (that is, it resists flow of electrical current) – a finding that has implications for the use of graphene as an electronic material in the semiconductor and electronics industries.
"BLG becomes insulating because its electrons spontaneously organize themselves when their number is small," said Chun Ning (Jeanie) Lau, an associate professor of physics and astronomy and the lead author of the research paper. "Instead of moving around randomly, the electrons move in an orderly fashion. This is called 'spontaneous symmetry breaking' in physics, and is a very important concept since it is the same principle that 'endows' mass for particles in high energy physics."
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