New conductive and magnetic material

You may have heard of graphene, the so called wonder material set to revolutionise electronics but the difficulty to consistently add extra properties and scale up cheaply limits industrial use! Scientists have been looking for easy to make alternatives, such as a new class of materials called metal organic frameworks or MOFs. As the name suggests, they’re made by combining two components: a metal and something called an “organic chain” which contains carbon with some other elements. These can be used to create new materials with exciting properties. The big problem is that scientists have not been able to introduce magnetic properties and electrical conductivity to metal organic frameworks, limiting their application in electronics, until now. Tamsin Bell spoke with Kasper Pederson from the Technical University of Denmark to find out what they have been doing…