many years, Takashi Taniguchi and Kenji Watanabe Like most other physicists, they were relatively unknown to the wider world. National Institute for Materials Science near Tokyo, Japan.
Then, almost overnight, they became a huge success. They were growing cubic boron nitride, which has the same three-dimensional structure as diamond. One day, out of curiosity, they investigated another type of boron nitride crystal. This crystal, sometimes grown as a by-product in the lab, was a flat, two-dimensional shape.
So they hit the gold inadvertently. It was around this time that another 2D matter began to create waves. Made of sheets of carbon one atom thick, graphene was called a “wonder material” because it is an excellent conductor, stronger than diamond and lighter than paper. An influx of graphene research began, trying to make the most of this stuff.
The problem was that to study graphene, we needed something very flat with just the right properties to attach thin sheets of wafers to. Turned out to be by-product crystals.
Their high-purity 2D boron nitride crystals are, by wide consensus, the best in the world. Today, what was once a waste product is available to everyone in the graphene field, enabling groundbreaking research, and the two scientists are co-authors of more than 1,000 of his studies. .they said new scientist How they honed their skills and found themselves at the center of the materials revolution, becoming the world’s most in-demand crystal producer.
