Scientists since long have been looking for a material that could make it possible to pack more transistors on a chip. Now a recent research form McGill University and Université de Montréal provided new evidence that black phosphorus can be used to do so.

Researchers in the study published today in Nature Communications stated that when electrons move in a phosphorus transistor, they do so only in two dimensions. Study’s findings suggest that black phosphorous can help engineers to design energy-efficient transistors.

Lead author Thomas Szkopek, an associate professor in McGill’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said, “Transistors work more efficiently when they are thin, with electrons moving in only two dimensions. Nothing gets thinner than a single layer of atoms”.

It was in 2004 when researchers at the University of Manchester in U.K. first isolated and explored the remarkable properties of grapheme. Since then scientists have been involved in investigating a range of other two-dimensional materials, one of those is black phosphorous.

Black phosphorous is a form of phosphorous which is quite similar to graphite and gets easily separated into single atomic layers, known as phosphorene.

Phosphorene has gained scientists’ interest because it overcomes several the challenges of using graphene in electronics. Unlike graphene, black phosphorus is a natural semiconductor and can be readily switched on and off.

Szkopek, said in a statement that in order to lower the operating voltage of transistors, and reduce the heat generated by the, they have to get a closer look into it to design the transistor at the atomic level.

The study was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Le regroupement québécois sur les matériaux de pointe, the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies, and the Canada Research Chairs program.