Two years after physicists predicted that tin should be able to form a mesh just one atom thick, researchers say that they have made it. The thin film, called stanene, is reported on 3 August in Nature Materials. But researchers have not been able to confirm whether the material has the predicted exotic electronic properties that have excited theorists, such as being able to conduct electricity without generating any waste heat.
Stanene (from the Latin stannum meaning tin, which also gives the element its chemical symbol, Sn), is the latest cousin of graphene, the honeycomb lattice of carbon atoms that has spurred thousands of studies into related 2D materials. Those include sheets of silicene, made from silicon atoms; phosphorene, made from phosphorus; germanene, from germanium; and thin stacks of sheets that combine different kinds of chemical elements.
Many of these sheets are excellent conductors of electricity, but stanene is — in theory — extra-special. At room temperature, electrons should be able to travel along the edges of the mesh without colliding with other electrons and atoms as they do in most materials. This should allow the film to conduct electricity without losing energy as waste heat, according to predictions2 made in 2013 by Shou-Cheng Zhang, a physicist at Stanford University in California, who is a co-author of the latest study.
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1 comment:
This article is amazingly tame for talking about a room-temperature superconductor that may or may not now have been invented, and could revolutionize more than we can envision. But, guess we'll have to see if it pans out! Sure hope so though, as then we can install it in our roads and sidewalks to support hover boards and cars.
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