Effective manipulating the electronic structure of any given material is always being an attractive issue for scientists and engineers for the huge potential applications. Materials with precisely manipulated electronic structure could be used to assemble electronic devices, and the ability to control electrical property of a material by externally applied voltage is at the heart in modern electronics. However, the electronic structure of conventional material is fixed and hard to control for their fixed crystalline structure. Recently, graphene attracted much attention due to its possibility to provide potential solution for this issue. Graphene is a monolayer of carbon atoms tightly bonded together with σ bonds, and with a π orbital perpendicular to the plane in each carbon atom in the lattice, has many exotic physical properties, such as high intrinsic carrier mobility, ambipolar field effect and anomalous quantum Hall Effects.

Recently Prof. Yi Xie’s group (USTC) proposed that inorganic-graphene alternately intercalated nanosheets should be an effective solution to optimize the transport property of graphene. Their results show that a novel LiVO-graphene alternately intercalated hybrid was synthesized for the first time and then exfoliated into ultrathin nanosheets. Working together with Prof. Jinlong Yang’s group (USTC) for calculation of electronic structure of LiVO-graphene with different Li ion position, they found that the carrier type of the graphene layer could be altered by rocking the embedded Li ions back and forth with the application of external electric field. The rocking chair configuration of LiVO-graphene alternately intercalated nanosheets may provide a new way for electrical modulation.

Their research work of “Rocking-Chair Configuration in Ultrathin Lithium Vanadate-Graphene Hybrid Nanosheets for Electrical Modulation” was published on Scientific Reports (2013, 3, 1246).