Magnetic Graphene

While pristine sheets of graphene are intrinsically nonmagnetic, graphene can be made ferromagnetic by doping the material with magnetic impurities. However, the dopants can be detrimental to graphene’s highly sought-after electronic properties. Now Jing Shi and colleagues from the University of California, Riverside, have developed an alternative route to magnetizing a single sheet of graphene by bringing it into close proximity with a magnetic insulator. They show that this turns graphene into a ferromagnet, while preserving its large electron mobility.