Researchers in South Korea have developed a breakthrough that could lead to harder-wearing electronic devices. By chemically inducing the transformation of chemical vapour deposition grown bilayer graphene into a thin, single-layer diamond layer, allowing electronics to potentially become stronger than conventional devices available on the market.
But why diamond? The carbon atoms in diamond are strongly connected in a three-dimensional space, producing a sturdy material with significant advantages over graphene, which is a sheet of carbon with a thickness of just one atom.
The end product, graphite, is comprised of graphene sheets which are stacked on top of each other. It has strong bonds within each sheet but has weak bonds connecting the different sheets together, making it weaker than diamond-based products.
The difficulty in moving from graphite-based electronics to diamond comes in the complexity of diamond-based layers. A common method of creating ‘diamane’ layers with conventional methods is by using high pressures to create the layer,but the material reverts back into graphene when pressure is removed.
The breakthrough, made by fluorinating graphene sheets in Bernal-stacked bilayer graphene grown by chemical vapour deposition allows the surface to trigger the formation of inter-layer carbon-carbon bonds to create a fluorinated diamond layer.
This development allows the diamond layers to be produced without applying levels of high pressure which could allow for cheaper and more robust electronics.