Fundamental Aspects of Carbon-Based Electronics

YAKOV KOPELEVICH

Title

Fundamental Aspects of Carbon-Based Electronics

Abstract

Graphite is one of the allotrope forms of carbon. It possesses a sheet-like structure where carbon atoms lie in a plane and are weakly bonded to the graphitic sheets above and below. This one atom thick graphitic sheet dubbed graphene is a bipartite lattice made up of two interpenetrating triangular sublattices with two carbon atoms per unit cell. The enormous current interest to graphitic and related materials is driven by their unusual physics governed by massless Dirac quasi-particles as in quantum electrodynamics and cosmology, and by potential broad technological applications. Amorphous carbon (AC) is a strongly disordered material consisting of a submicron curved graphene layers with a mixed interlayer stacking required, for instance, for superconductivity, ferromagnetism, and resistive switches. Here, we present experimental results demonstrating the occurrence of these remarkable phenomena in disordered graphite, AC nano-arrays, and graphite-silicon heterostructures, and discuss applications of graphene-based materials in future electronics.