Eat your heart out silicon.

That's exciting. I was getting worried about the world's ability to make silicon in the quantities it currently does for long. I hope this means better solar panels will come from this material as well.

We'll see. There are plenty of things that are better than silicon in a lab setting. Super conductor transistors based on Josephson Junctions are much faster (and arrays of several hundred thousands were fabricated), GaAs is a far better semiconductor for optical (lasers and photovoltaics) purposes. There are others, but we still use silicon. Doesn't mean the transition wouldn't happen at some point, but we will have to see.

EDIT: I started reading the paper. It needs another material to form the gate, so it's not just the material. Second problem is similar to graphene -- how to produce and arrange large quantities of single sheets and how to control the process. Since I have been working on the graphene issue before I came to Omaha, I can tell you, it is rather difficult

icerose said:

That's exciting. I was getting worried about the world's ability to make silicon in the quantities it currently does for long.

Click to expand...

Don't worry, that's one material we'll never run out of.

Lhun said:

Don't worry, that's one material we'll never run out of.

Click to expand...

It's not the silicon itself but some of the rare minerals it takes to complete the process that I'm worried about.

I had a seminar a couple of days ago with a professor from the University of Kansas. He works with graphene and talked about some pretty cool things. At the end, in the Q&A session, I asked about the paper. They seem pretty enthusiastic about it, too. Already bought some molybdenite
It appears that it might be actually easier to exfoliate (create one layer thin sheets).