Photo credit: Sampson Wilcox/Research Laboratory of Electronics
MIT physicists have successfully turned pencil lead into gold by isolating five ultrathin flakes in a specific order. The researchers were then able to tune the resulting material to exhibit three important properties never before seen in natural graphite.
Pencil lead, or graphite, is composed of graphene, which is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in hexagons resembling a honeycomb structure. The team found that five layers of graphene arranged in a specific order allow the electrons moving around inside the material to talk with each other, a phenomenon known as electron correlation.
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It is kind of like one-stop shopping. Nature has plenty of surprises. In this case, we never realized that all of these interesting things are embedded in graphite,” said Long Ju, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics.
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