Graphene holds promise

 A promising material for high frequency electronics

Graphene is a one atom thick single layer of graphite. The 2 dimensional honeycomb atomic structure results in graphene electronic properties that are similar to light, and allows graphene to achieve extremely high electronic mobilities. These high mobilities along with graphene’s ability to modulate its conductance using an electrostatic gate, its high current carrying capacity and chemical stability, make graphene a promising material for high frequency electronics (teraherz compared to today’s gigahertz switching times). While multilayer graphene grown on SiC has already been shown to be scalable to large area circuit arrays, it remained to be proven if this material had the electronic properties of a single graphene sheet (a necessary requirement for graphene electronics). The experiments at Cassiopée have now confirmed this property and have opened the way for graphene electronics using this new material.

(a) ARPES measured band structure of an 11-layer C-face graphene grown on the 6H-SiC. The sample temperature is 6K. Two linear Dirac cones are visable. (b) A cut of data in (a) at E-EF= -0:675eV shows a third faint cone. Heavy solid line is a fit to the sum of six Lorentzians (thin solid lines).   [1] First direct observation of a nearly ideal graphene band structure M. Sprinkle, D. Siegel, Y. Hu, J. Hicks, P. Soukiassian, A. Tejeda, A. Taleb-Ibrahimi, P. Le Fèvre, F. Bertran, S. Vizzini, H. Enriquez, S. Chiang, C. Berger, W.A. de Heer, A. Lanzara, E.H. Conrad Phys Rev Lett, 103, 226803 (2009). Contact information: Amina Taleb-Ibrahimi, CASSIOPÉE beamline-SOLEIL, Claire Berger CNRS-Institut Néel and Georgia Tech, Ed Conrad, Georgia Tech.