New Scientist does its best to make nanomaterials sexy… like the new silicon stuff that’s stealing carbon’s limelight:
Patrick Vogt of Berlin’s Technical University in Germany, and colleagues at Aix-Marseille University in France created silicene by condensing silicon vapour onto a silver plate to form a single layer of atoms. They then measured the optical, chemical and electronic properties of the layer, showing it closely matched those predicted by theory (Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.155501).
Silicene may turn out to be a better bet than graphene for smaller and cheaper electronic devices because it can be integrated more easily into silicon chip production lines.