A team of scientists, led by Professor Jonathan Coleman, Principal Investigator at the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN) and the School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin, and Dr Valeria Nicolosi in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford, have discovered a way of splitting layered materials resulting in a whole family of new nanomaterials which have exceptional properties enabling exciting new technologies.

These novel materials have chemical and electronic properties which are well suited for applications in new electronic devices, super-strong composite materials and energy generation and storage. This research represents a major breakthrough towards the development of efficient thermoelectric materials.

Professor Coleman said, "Of the many applications of these new materials, possibly the most important are as thermoelectric materials. These materials, when fabricated into devices, can generate electricity from waste heat. For example, in gas-fired power plants approximately 50pc of energy produced is lost as waste heat while for coal and oil plants the figure is up to 70pc. However, development of efficient thermoelectric devices would allow this waste heat to be recycled cheaply and easily, something that has been beyond us up to now."

The novel technique discovered by Prof. Coleman and his collaborators is simple, fast and inexpensive and could be scaled up to work on an industrial scale. "Our new method offers low-costs, a very high yield and a very large throughput: within a couple of hours, and with just 1 mg of material, billions and billions of one-atom-thick nanosheets can be made at the same time from a wide variety of exotic layered materials," said Dr Nicolosi, from the University of Oxford.

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