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SILICENE, a material consisting of an atom-thick layer of silicon, has been successfully used to make a transistor.
Silicene, like graphene, can move data much faster than conventional silicon. While it remains difficult to manufacture due to its tendency to decay when exposed to air, its relationship with silicon is of interest to researchers. If it becomes easier to manufacture, it would be a smaller step to move from silicon-based electronics to silicene, rather than graphene.
Deji Akinwande, a researcher at the University of Texas-Austin, grew the silicene on a wafer, then stored it in a vacuum to prevent it from degrading. The resulting transistors allowed electron movement with little to no resistance.
According to Akinwande, silicene has a sensitive surface and a Dirac bandstructure that means it could be a widely tuneable 2D monolayer, where external fields and interface interactions can be exploited to influence fundamental properties such as bandgap and band character for future nanoelectronic devices.
Additionally, monolayer silicene is theoretically capable of being host to quantum spin Hall effect, chiral superconductivity, giant magnetoresistance and other exotic field-dependent states.