Main Attraction: Scientists Create World’s Thinnest Magnet – Just One Atom Thick!
upstart writes:
Main Attraction: Scientists Create World's Thinnest Magnet - Just One Atom Thick!
A one-atom-thin 2D magnet developed by Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley could advance new applications in computing and electronics.
[...] The researchers synthesized the new 2D magnet - called a cobalt-doped van der Waals zinc-oxide magnet - from a solution of graphene oxide, zinc, and cobalt.
Just a few hours of baking in a conventional lab oven transformed the mixture into a single atomic layer of zinc-oxide with a smattering of cobalt atoms sandwiched between layers of graphene.
In a final step, the graphene is burned away, leaving behind just a single atomic layer of cobalt-doped zinc-oxide.
[...] To confirm that the resulting 2D film is just one atom thick, Yao and his team conducted scanning electron microscopy experiments at Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry to identify the material's morphology, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) imaging to probe the material atom by atom.
X-ray experiments at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source characterized the 2D material's magnetic parameters under high temperature.
Additional X-ray experiments at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource verified the electronic and crystal structures of the synthesized 2D magnets. And at Argonne National Laboratory's Center for Nanoscale Materials, the researchers employed TEM to image the 2D material's crystal structure and chemical composition.
The researchers found that the graphene-zinc-oxide system becomes weakly magnetic with a 5-6% concentration of cobalt atoms. Increasing the concentration of cobalt atoms to about 12% results in a very strong magnet.
To their surprise, a concentration of cobalt atoms exceeding 15% shifts the 2D magnet into an exotic quantum state of frustration," whereby different magnetic states within the 2D system are in competition with each other.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.