Nanotechnology Now - Press Release: Ribbons of graphene push the material�s potential: A new technique developed at Columbia offers a systematic evaluation of twist angle and strain in layered 2D materials

Think you know everything about a material? Try giving it a twist­—literally. That’s the main idea of an emerging field in condensed matter physics called “twistronics,” which has researchers drastically changing the properties of 2D materials, like graphene, with subtle changes—as small as going from a 1.1° to 1.2°—in the angle between stacked layers. Twisted layers of graphene, for example, have been shown to behave in ways that single sheets have not, including acting like magnets, like electrical superconductors, or like a superconductor’s opposite, insulators, all due to small changes in the twist angle between sheets.