Researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany have shown that when graphene is irradiated with ions, or electrically charged atoms, the electrons that are ejected give information about the graphene’s electronic behavior. “Irradiating materials and observing the change in properties to deduce what’s going on inside the material is a well-established technique, but now, we are taking first steps towards using ions instead of laser light for that purpose,” said André Schleife, one of the scientists involved in this study. “The advantage is that ions allow highly localized, short-time excitations in the material compared to what laser light can do. This enables high-precision studies of how graphene and other 2D materials evolve over time.”
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