Science Focus
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As a physicist, I have a secret. It's something that I shouldn't admit to, but, I kind of like chemistry (eww, I feel all dirty after writing that). One of the coolest things about chemistry is that you can play with atoms a bit like a kid plays with Lego bricks. New materials—ones never found in nature—can be dreamed up with relative ease.
But just because chemical bonds make atoms fit together in the Lego sense, it doesn't mean that the atoms will stay together. It also doesn't tell you how to get them to assemble—this is the real challenge of creating new materials. Anticipating the interest in two-dimensional materials, researchers in the past proposed that it might be possible to create sheets of carbon bound to nitrogen, called graphitic carbon nitride. In the intervening years, many have tried to produce the material, but all have failed until now.
The path to a new material
Before beginning the battle to synthesize a new material, you need to decide if the fight is worthwhile. In this case, quantum chemists have developed some wonderful tools that let you calculate many properties of materials that don't exist yet. Once you have designed a structure, these programs calculate where the electrons will gather. The calculations reveal how much energy it will take to shift electrons from one energetic state to another, among many other things.
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