To produce the material, the team combined semiconducting molecules buckminsterfullerene (C60) with layered materials, such as graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN).
According to the researchers, the combination works because hBN provides stability, electronic compatibility and isolation charge to graphene while C60 can transform sunlight into electricity.
“Our findings show that this new ‘miracle material’ has similar physical properties to silicon but it has improved chemical stability, lightness and flexibility, which could potentially be used in smart devices and would be much less likely to break,” explained Dr Elton Santos.
“The material also could mean that devices use less energy than before because of the device architecture so could have improved battery life and less electric shocks.”
One issue that still needs to be solved is that graphene and the new material architecture is lacking a ‘band gap’, which is the key to the on-off switching operations performed by electronic devices.
However, the team is already looking at a potential solution – transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). TMDs are chemically very stable, have large sources for production and band gaps that rival silicon.
“These are semiconductors, which by-pass the problem of the band gap, so we now have a real transistor on the horizon, but in future we hope to add an additional feature with TMDs,” Dr Santos concluded.