Graphene’s exceptional electrical conductance makes it a prime target for spintronics technologies, which exploit the spin of the electron for data storage and transfer. However, it’s hard to manipulate the spins of graphene’s electrons because of weak spin-orbit coupling—the coupling between an electron’s spin and its motion. Researchers have circumvented this problem by placing graphene layers on transition-metal dichalcogenide (TMD) materials with strong spin-orbit coupling.…
Electric switching of magnetism in 2D
Writing in Nature Nanotechnology, B. Huang et al. and S. Jiang et al. report the use of electrostatic gating to change not only the direction but the type of magnetic order in CrI3.
Searching for materials with reduced dimension
High-throughput electronic structure calculations, together with structural data-mining algorithms, allow the identification of new two-dimensional materials. Olle Eriksson Two-dimensional materials from high-throughput computational exfoliation of experimentally known compounds Nicolas Mounet et al.,
Secrets of superconductivity in graphene
Pablo Jarillo-Herrero (MIT) presents his surprising discovery of an ultrathin material consisting of two misaligned sheets of graphene that can be easily converted from being a Mott insulator to a superconductor at the APS March Meeting 2018 in Los Angeles, CA. Novel electronic states seen in graphene A simple system made from two sheets of graphene has been converted from an insulator to a superconductor.…