Dr. Roman Gorbachev
Royal Society University Research Fellow: experimental condensed matter physics
Hexagonal boron nitride is like the sister of graphene, only instead of carbon atoms you have boron and nitrogen atoms in the lattice. You prepare the two materials separately using mechanical exfoliation to peel thin sheets from larger crystals. Then you take a tiny graphene crystal and put it face down onto the boron nitride using my special micropositioning machine. When you do this the electronic quality of graphene is improved by like, a hundred times. We were the first group to combine 2D materials in Manchester and it all started when I was working with Andre as a postdoc. This has since evolved into a huge scientific field of research.
The work began just using boron nitride as a very flat surface to support graphene. Now we’ve learned to combine atomically thin sheets of many different crystals to build up structures layer by layer in a precisely chosen sequence. This allows us to design new materials with special and unique electronic properties. Our approach gives us access to new materials which do not exist in nature and which cannot be grown artificially by any other technique.