The flat menagerie [News]

"Flat land" has never looked so good. A little less than a decade ago, physicists showed they could pull away loosely bound layers of graphite to reveal graphene, a 2-D carbon structure. The material was shown to have very promising electronic properties. But graphene isn\´t the only game in town. A whole host of 2-D structures are attracting attention. Many can be formed just as graphene is, from layered 3-D materials; one such material, molybdenum disulfide, has been used in recent months to form flexible, transparent transistors and some of the basic building blocks of logic chips. Others are flattened forms of naturally 3-D structures. In April, for example, a team based at Ohio State University reported they had wrangled germanium, a mainstay of the semiconductor industry, into a 2-D structure that transports electrons faster than its 3-D counterpart does.