Suspended Graphene: a bridge to the Dirac point

Understand

The recent discovery of methods to isolate graphene, a one-atom-thick layer of crystalline carbon, has raised the possibility of a new class of nano-electronics devices based on the extraordinary electrical transport and unusual physical properties of this material.

• However, the experimental realization of devices displaying these properties was, until now, hampered by the influence of the ambient environment, primarily the substrate.
• Here we report on the fabrication of Suspended Graphene devices and on studies of their electrical transport properties.
• In these devices, environmental disturbances were minimized allowing unprecedented access to the intrinsic properties of graphene close to the Dirac Point (DP) where the energy dispersion of the carriers and their density-of-states vanish linearly giving rise to a range of exotic physical properties.