EPFL Invited to Participate in EU Graphene Flagship Research Initiative

Four EPFL professors have been invited to participate in the Graphene Flagship. This research initiative has been selected by the EU at the same time as the EPFL-led Human Brain Project to receive significant financial support over the next ten years.

The Graphene Flagship is an EU research initiative that aims to take graphene “from the realm of academic laboratories into European society” by fostering networking and collaboration between researchers from diverse fields, industry partners and investors. The project has already received 1 billion euros in funding and will span ten years. The outcome is expected to generate economic growth in Europe by creating new jobs and opportunities propelled by the development of novel graphene-based technologies and applications.

EPFL has been invited to participate in the Graphene Flagship, represented by professors Andras Kis (nanoscale electronics and structures), Tobias Kippenberg (photonics, optical nanocavities), Oleg Yazyev (Dirac fermion materials), and Nicola Marzari (materials theory and simulation), who also leads NCCR-MARVEL, an EPFL-led National Center to develop new materials using quantum simulations. The Graphene Flagship is not restricted to graphene, but broadly involves novel 2D materials such as molybdenum disulphide (MoS₂).

Graphene is a 2D crystal material whose structure is made up of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. In the past decade, graphene has been the subject of intense research and the Novel Prize in Physics in 2010 was awarded for pioneering experiments on this material. But while graphene was the first 2D crystal, recent years have seen a rapid expansion of research in this field in the direction of other 2D semiconductors such as MoS₂, sometimes also referred to as molybdenite. EPFL played the pioneering role in this field, where the group of Andras Kis made the first low-power transistors, integrated circuits, flash memory and high-sensitivity photodetectors using molybdenite, which is now being considered for a wide range of applications in areas such as flexible electronics, solar cells and portable computing.

With the Graphene Flagship, the EU launches an unprecedented platform for coordinating research, bringing together an “academic-industrial consortium aiming at a breakthrough for technological innovation”. This enormous initiative will cover the entire 2D material value chain, “from materials production to components and system integration, and targets a number of specific goals that exploit the unique properties of 2D materials.”

It should be noted that the group of Tobias Kippenberg is involved in another flagship with IMEC in Leuven, which aims to integrate graphene and other 2D materials with chip-scale optical microresonators for novel photonic devices developed at the EPFL Centre for Micro-Nanotechnology.

Author: Nik Papageorgiou
Source: Mediacom