2D materials, which consist of a few layers of atoms, may well be the future of nanotechnology. They offer potential new applications and could be used in small, higher-performance and more energy-efficient devices. 2D materials were first discovered almost 15 years ago, but only a few dozen of them have been synthesized so far.

Now, thanks to an approach developed by researchers from EPFL’s Theory and Simulation of Materials Laboratory (THEOS) and from NCCR-MARVEL for Computational Design and Discovey of Novel Materials, many more promising 2D materials may now be identified. Their work was recently published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology (“Two-dimensional materials from high-throughput computational exfoliation of experimentally known compounds”), and even got a mention on the cover page.

The first 2D material to be isolated was graphene, in 2004, earning the researchers who discovered it a Nobel Prize in 2010. This marked the start of a whole new era in electronics, as graphene is light, transparent and resilient and, above all, a good conductor of electricity. It paved the way to new applications in numerous fields such as photovoltaics and optoelectronics.

“To find other materials with similar properties, we focused on the feasibility of exfoliation,” explains Nicolas Mounet, a researcher in the THEOS lab and lead author of the study. “But instead of placing adhesive strips on graphite to see if the layers peeled off, like the Nobel Prize winners did, we used a digital method.”

Image Credit:  G.Pizzi, EPFL

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