Transistor Made From Silicene

With all the focus and attention paid on graphene, it is easy to forget that there are more potential for silicene, graphene single-layer cousin, to be made into an electronic device.

This report highlights one such accomplishment of producing a proof-of-principle capability of using silicene to make an important device - a transistor.

“For logic applications, graphene is hopeless,” says Le Lay. By contrast, silicene can boast a band gap, because some of its atoms buckle upwards to form corrugated ridges, which puts some of its electrons in slightly different energy states. What is more, makers of electronic chips have been wary of ditching decades of silicon-manufacturing experience in favour of carbon, says Lok Lew Yan Voon, a theoretical physicist at the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina in Charleston, who first named silicene and modelled its properties back in 2007.

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