We’ve been talking for quite a long time about the crazy things that happen in Andres Castellanos’s Lab. And they seem to be getting crazier. The ability of this people for outside the box thinking is amazing. Actually they don’t seem to know about the box at all!
They are now working in the use of paper as a functional substrate for van der Waals materials. This materials are deposited by “simply rubbing the vdW crystals against the rough surface of paper”. The aim is to replace silicon with a cheap material. But is it paper a valid substrate? In this new work, they’ve characterized the optical and electronic properties of some of this materials in this strange new conditions. As vdW materials can behave as superconductors, insulators, semiconductors or semi-metals, researchers have to prove all these properties are maintained when transferred into paper.
And that is exactly what they did by building field-effect devices using the paper substrate as an ionic gate. This work, published in Applied Materials Today, has been featured in the cover.