At first, the physics doctoral students working with a new kind of semiconductor they developed with two UB faculty members thought they had made a mistake. They thought it was ruined. The UB team had, they discovered, created the world's first flexible semiconductor. The first single-crystal, semiconducting nanomaterials that bend, but don't break were described recently in Applied Physics Letters. They can be peeled right off their supports almost as though one were peeling an address label from a sheet of labels and some of them were made using ordinary weatherstripping silicone.
Semiconductors lie at the heart of micro-electronic devices.
But these semiconductors can bend like rubber. Because they retain both their structural integrity and optical prop erties, the semiconductors are seen as particularly significant for future advances in optical computing, where information will be carried by light instead of by electrons. Other applications lie in optical waveguides for telecommunications and in high-efficiency solar cells for the military, which should be lightweight but sturdy and flexible enough to withstand rocket blastoff and battlefield conditions. But such thin materials are, of course, extremely fragile. They need to be supported by something, which makes it a physicist's problem.