**Nanocomposites**

**Chapter 0**

**Chapter 1**

**Graphene-Boron Nitride Composite: A Material**

The discovery of two dimensional materials is extremely exciting due to their unique properties, resulting from the lowering of dimensionality. Physics in 2D is quite rich (e.g., high temperature superconductivity, fractional quantum Hall effect etc.) and is different from its other dimensional counterparts. A 2D material acts as the bridge between bulk 3D systems and 0D quantum dots or 1D chain materials. This can well be the building block for materials with other dimensions. The discovery of graphene, the 2D allotrope of carbon by Geim and Novoselov [1] made an enormous sensation owing to a plethora of exciting properties. They were awarded the Nobel prize in Physics in 2010. Graphene, an atomically thick C layer, has broken the jinx of impossibility of the formation of a 2D structure at a finite temperature, as argued by Landau *et al.*[2, 3]. The argument that a 2D material is thermodynamically unstable due to the out-of-plane thermal distortion, which is comparable to its bond length, was proven invalid with this discovery. One of the recent interests is to understand this apparent discrepancy by considering rippled structures of graphene at finite temperatures. Graphene, with its exciting appearance, has won the crowns of the thinnest, the strongest, the most stretchable material along with extremely high electron mobility and thermal conductivity [4]. The linear dispersion curve at the Dirac point gives rise to exciting elementary electronic properties. Electrons in graphene behave like massless Dirac fermions, similar to the relativistic particles in quantum electrodynamics and hence has brought different branches of science together under a truly interdisciplinary platform. At low temperature and high magnetic field, a fascinating phenomenon, called the half integer quantum hall effect, is observed. The relativistic nature of carriers in graphene shows 100% tunneling through a potential barrier by changing its chirality. The phenomenon is known as "Klein-Paradox". Minimum conductivity of a value of conductivity quantum (*e*2/*h* per spin per valley) is measured at zero field, which makes graphene unique. "The CERN on table top" is thus a significant naming of the experiments performed with this fascinating material [5]. An infinite pristine graphene is a semi metal, i. e., a metal with zero band gap [6]. Inversion symmetry provided by *P*6/*mmm* space group results in a band degeneracy at the Dirac points

> ©2012 Bhandary and Sanyal, licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is

©2012 Bhandary and Sanyal, licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use,

distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

**with Advanced Functionalities**

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

properly cited.

Sumanta Bhandary and Biplab Sanyal

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/50729

**1. Introduction**
