Buckling Magnetic Graphene Will Make Many Gadgets and Nanorobots

Buckling in graphene mimics the effect of colossally large magnetic fields that are unattainable with today’s magnet technologies. Graphene buckles when cooled while attached to a flat surface.

Buckling, magnetic graphene can be a platform for stretchable electronics with many important applications, including eye-like digital cameras, energy harvesting, skin sensors, health monitoring devices like tiny robots and intelligent surgical gloves. The discovery opens the way to the development of devices for controlling nano-robots that may one day play a role in biological diagnostics and tissue repair.

Graphene is placed on a flat surface made of niobium diselenide, buckles when cooled to 4 degrees above absolute zero. To the electrons in graphene, the mountain and valley landscape created by the buckling appears as gigantic magnetic fields. These pseudo-magnetic fields are an electronic illusion, but they act as real magnetic fields.

Nature- Evidence of flat bands and correlated states in buckled graphene superlattices

Two-dimensional atomic crystals can radically change their properties in response to external influences, such as substrate orientation or strain, forming materials with novel electronic structure. An example is the creation of weakly dispersive, ‘flat’ bands in bilayer graphene for certain ‘magic’ angles of twist between the orientations of the two layers. The quenched kinetic energy in these flat bands promotes electron–electron interactions and facilitates the emergence of strongly correlated phases, such as superconductivity and correlated insulators. However, the very accurate fine-tuning required to obtain the magic angle in twisted-bilayer graphene poses challenges to fabrication and scalability. Here we present an alternative route to creating flat bands that does not involve fine-tuning. Using scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy, together with numerical simulations, we demonstrate that graphene monolayers placed on an atomically flat substrate can be forced to undergo a buckling transition, resulting in a periodically modulated pseudo-magnetic field, which in turn creates a ‘post-graphene’ material with flat electronic bands. When we introduce the Fermi level into these flat bands using electrostatic doping, we observe a pseudogap-like depletion in the density of states, which signals the emergence of a correlated state. This buckling of two-dimensional crystals offers a strategy for creating other superlattice systems and, in particular, for exploring interaction phenomena characteristic of flat bands.

SOURCES- Rutgers University, Nature
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

3 thoughts on “Buckling Magnetic Graphene Will Make Many Gadgets and Nanorobots”

  1. I don’t have to hold my breath… There are already sensors that make use of magnetic fields which are cooled to those temperatures.

  2. Don’t hold your breath. Had to be cooled to 4 degrees kelvin which means liquid helium was required. Now, If they can find out how to produce this topology w/o resorting extreme cryogenics we’ll be on to something.

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