Dr. Artem Mishchenko
EPSRC Research Fellow: 2D materials and nanoelectromechanics
In terms of applications, it's hard to predict right now because a lot depends on whether we can actually grow all these structures at a large scale, like metre size. The way I work is that I’m testing ideas. Maybe I’ll try this, and then I look in the literature and see whether anybody has done it already. Then sometimes you look and think, that’s a nice thing to try but why not do it this way? And then you find another paper, ah that's why, so it doesn't work. I mean most of the time it's quite boring. It's not like, oh yeah, a new discovery every week but there have been a few times.
One time was with tunnelling transistors actually. We had a device where two graphene flakes were crystallographically aligned to each other which we hadn’t realised. It looked like 90 degrees misaligned. We saw a peak in the current we didn’t understand. We were just sitting there and discussing it and then Kostya started drawing the band diagram of the device, like, one Dirac cone on top of the other. I asked why, why are you drawing them on top of each other? Maybe they're just like, slightly misaligned by one degree and this can explain everything; that's why we can see this peak. Then I did the calculations really quickly, faster than the theoreticians. It was really funny, so like, I’m writing an email, telling the theory guys no, you should do it this way. They were like, you're really smart. These things don't happen often.