Washington, June 18: A team of researchers has suggested a new way to turn graphene into a semiconductor, enabling it to control the flow of electrons with a laser `on-off switch'.

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Graphene is the thinnest and strongest material ever discovered. It''s a layer of carbon atoms only one-atom thick, but 200 times stronger than steel.

However, despite being a good conductor of electricity and heat, it suffers from one drawback. Graphene doesn''t have a `band gap', which is the basic property of semiconductors that enables materials to control the flow of electrons.

This on-off property is the foundation of computers, encoding the 0s and 1s of computer languages.

But, researchers have now identified that using a laser in the mid-infrared can open an observable band gap in this otherwise gapless material.

"Imagine that by turning on the light, graphene conduction is turned off, or vice versa. This would allow the transduction of optical into electrical signals," said Luis Foa Torres, lead researcher.

"The problem of graphene interacting with radiation is also of current interest for the understanding of more exotic states of matter such as the topological insulators," he added.

The research findings appear in Applied Physics Letters. (ANI)