A group of materials scientists at Australia’s CSIRO and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology believe they have found a way to make graphene more usable in electronics applications.

While it’s often touted as a wonder-stuff, graphene is still under development in electronics applications, and one of the issues is that atomic-scale defects in the lattice can scatter the carriers.

In a paper to appear in Advanced Materials, the researchers describe using molybdenum oxides to improve graphene’s charge-carrying capabilities.

By creating these layered nano-sheets, the CSIRO’s Dr Serge Zhuiykov said “electrons are able to zip through with minimal scattering”.

The result, according to RMIT’s Professor Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh, is that the material can be used to create devices that are both smaller and support faster data transfer.

“While more work needs to be done before we can develop actual gadgets using this new 2D nano-material, this breakthrough lays the foundation for a new electronics revolution and we look forward to exploring its potential”, he said.

The researchers used exfoliation to create sheets of their material around 11 nanometers thick, which they then turned into a semiconductor to fabricate transistors.

The result is a device with electron mobility greater than 1,100 cm2/Vs (centimeters squared per volt-second), which they state exceeds the current standard for low dimensional silicon.

As well as lead author RMIT doctoral researcher Sivacarendran Balendhran and CSIRO, the research included participants from Monash University, UCLA, and MIT. ®