Engineers and scientists at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (UWM) have accidentally stumbled upon what could be the future of semi conductor technology. Of course, this is still an idea is still in its infancy, but scientists have synthesized a material called Graphene monoxide (GMO), which gives graphene the properties of a semiconductor. The ironic thing is that they were not really searching for graphene oxide as the team was only interested in creating a carbon nanotube out of graphene oxide.
The team heated graphene oxide as part of their research to obtain a pure sheet of graphene so that they could synthesize a carbon nanotube for their experiments. But at a certain point in the heating process they observed that the graphene oxide turned into graphene monoxide and it seemed to form a stable structure that behaved like a semiconductor. The team produced four different substances through the process of heating at various temperature points and they named them collectively as GMO.
The new layers of GMO not only exhibit semiconductor properties that might enable the synthesis of future transistors and other electronic components that could replace the current silicon based ones. Due to its formation as sheets, the graphene monoxide can also be used as a surface catalyst in chemical reactions and also in some medical procedures. A graphene semiconductor that can be scaled up and used commercially is what the world is currently after and while GMO promises a lot, the task of perfecting its synthesis, understanding how heat affects it and synthesis on a macro scale means there are plenty of challenges ahead before it actually becomes a workable material in making of modern electronic circuits.
Via: Uwm
