Honeycomb silicon carbide: a research surprise

Silicon Carbide, A Research Surprise

While physicists and materials scientists have been trying to produce large-area, two-dimensional, high-quality silicon carbide (SiC) for some time with little to no success, a recent study at Bloch beamline made an unexpected breakthrough.

Researchers reported a potential technique to grow large-area monolayer honeycomb SiC with a bottom-up synthesis process. The material is predicted to have a large direct band gap (2.5 eV), ambient stability, and chemical versatility, offering the next level of material exploration for future applications.

We sat down with Craig Polley, Bloch beamline manager, to talk about this research surprise and what it means.

“Before this work, it was unclear if it was even possible,” Polley said.

Read more on the research:

Bottom-up Growth of Monolayer Honeycomb SiC (Arxiv.org, 2023)

Study indentifies a new synthesis technique to attain monolayer honeycomb SiC (Phys.org, 2023)

Publication

C. M. Polley, H. Fedderwitz, T. Balasubramanian, A. A. Zakharov, R. Yakimova, O. Bäcke, J. Ekman, S. P. Dash, S. Kubatkin, and S. Lara-Avila Bottom-Up Growth of Monolayer Honeycomb SiC open_in_new Phys. Rev. Lett. 130, 076203 – Published 14 February 2023 https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.076203 open_in_new