Russian Researchers Contribute to the Creation of a New Family of Substances

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The creation of one-atom-thick 2D materials is a promising area in materials science today. Since the discovery of graphene in 2004 as the first 2D material, researchers across the world have been hard at work studying its properties, and trying to combine it with other materials.

Researchers from the National University of Science and Technology MISIS (NUST MISIS), the Technological Institute of Superhard and Novel Carbon Materials (Moscow) and the Institute of Biochemical Physics (Moscow), together with colleagues from the National Institute for Materials Science (Japan), were able to synthesize 2D copper oxide using graphene.

Unlike graphene with its hexagonal unit cells consisting of carbon atoms, 2D copper oxide has a square lattice, which makes it the first 2D material of this kind. The new material stands out by its antiferromagnetic ground state (low magnetism), whereas bulk Cu and CuO are paramagnetic.

Antiferromagnetics have great potential in microelectronics. For instance, in order to write one bit of data on an antiferromagnetic material, only 12 atoms of its surface are needed, whereas current technology uses hundreds of thousands of atoms to write the same amount of data.

Researchers believe that there could be other applications for their work. “Our discovery proved that graphene can be used as a basic element for producing various materials, including not only standalone materials, but also multi-layer 2D heterostructures,” Pavel Sorokin, senior research fellow at the NUST MISIS Inorganic Nanomaterials Laboratory, was quoted as saying in the university’s press release.