Engineers Make Electrical Contact to Graphene on It’s 1-Atom-Thick Edge

Graphene has presented all sorts of barriers for efforts to apply the material to electronics. It lacks a band gap, so research has focused on engineering one into it. Then even if you could engineer a band gap into the material, its challenging to manufacture at a high quality and high volume.

Another big obstacle is that graphene does not lend itself to being stacked with other materials, something that could be important to making graphene ICs. The reason is that electrical contacts have to be placed on the top surface of the graphene, making the layering of another material on top of those contacts complicated.

Now researchers at Columbia University have developed a way to contact 2-D graphene from its 1-D side.

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