Beckman Institute researcher Joe Lyding (in back) and graduate student Kyle Ritter are shown at the scanning tunneling microscope used in the experiment.

Imagine a single-walled carbon nanotube unrolled to a flat sheet the thickness of a single atom and you have graphene, a promising new material for future electronic and sensing applications. Beckman Institute researchers Joseph Lyding and Kyle Ritter have demonstrated semiconducting behavior in intrinsically metallic graphene by constraining its lateral dimensions to tens of nanometers, thus predicting the opening of a semiconducting gap due to quantum confinement effects. Read about their work here.