Engineering a band gap into graphene has become almost a rite of passage for research groups who work with the material. While many have accomplished this feat, many more have written off graphene in digital logic applications because of the fact that you have to give it a band gap.

It turns out that all of that engineering of graphene has revealed another feature: tunable electronic properties. This is accomplished by combining graphene with another material that has a very large band gap, like boron nitride—so-called heterostructures—or by giving graphene a twist.

Now, an international team of researchers from Columbia University, the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France have overcome some of the limitations that previous attempts to twist graphene have faced.