Thousands of 2D materials are just waiting to be discovered

Chemists have pinned their hopes on two-dimensional materials, such as graphene and hexagonal boron nitride as offering them a route to new electronics, optoelectronics and other technologies. Some of the materials have not yet lived up to expectations, but now, researchers from Switzerland, hope to vastly expand the chemical space of 2D materials and so offer technologists a range of off-the-shelf materials that could be chosen with a particular set of properties for a given application.

Nicola Marzari of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and colleagues there and at the Vilnius University Institute of Biotechnology in Lithuania, explain how they began their search for new 2D materials by looking at more than 100,000 unique, experimentally known three-dimensional compounds.