This item is a taste of the
present work on graphene which is now working with high quality samples and
best equipment to fully define the available characteristics and plausible
options. I suspect no no one has any
doubt remaining that we are looking at the future of electronics whatever
thousands of other practical applications are eventually put together.
This same week I am commenting on
a serious effort to coat a plow with the capability of graphene.
If anything is surprising at all
it is how slow the media has been to understand the story and to comment on
it. Graphene is not an incremental
improvement on silicon circuitry. It is
a revolution in mankind’s mastery of materials and electronics. The actual prospects are easily imagined and
they are mind boggling.
Just about anything we have
imagined in the past, however impractical, must be rethought against this new standard.
That plow, by the way, by using a
graphene or diamond like coating as they describe it, will cut the energy cost
of plowing by about thirty percent.
Nothing else could ever have done that.
Graphene's 'quantum leap' takes electronics a step closer
by Staff Writers
Writing in the journal Nature Physics, the academics, who discovered
the world's thinnest material at The University
of Manchester in 2004,
have revealed more about its electronic properties.
Research institutes and universities around the world are already
looking at ways to build devices such as touch-screens, ultrafast transistors
and photodetectors.
Now the research from the creators of the material promises to
accelerate that research, and potentially open up countless more electronic
opportunities.
The researchers, from the universities of Manchester ,
Madrid and Moscow , have studied in detail the effect of
interactions between electrons on
the electronic properties of graphene.
They use extremely high-quality graphene devices which are prepared by
suspending sheets of graphene in a vacuum.
This way most of the unwanted scattering mechanisms for electrons in
graphene could be eliminated, thus enhancing the effect of electron-on-electron
interaction.
This is the first effect of its kind where the interactions between
electrons in graphene could be clearly seen.
The reason for such unique electronic properties is that electrons in
this material are very different from those in any other metals. They mimic
massless relativistic particles - such as photons.
Due to such properties graphene is sometimes called 'CERN on a desk' -
referencing the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland . This is just one of
the reasons why the electronic properties are particularly exciting and often
bring surprises.
Professor Geim and Professor Novoselov's pioneering work won them theNobel Prize for Physics in
2010 for "groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional
material graphene".
The pair, who have worked together for more than a decade since
Professor Novoselov was Professor Geim's PHD student, used to devote every
Friday evening to 'out of the box' experiments not directly linked to their
main research topics.
One Friday, they used Scotch tape to peel away layers of carbon from a
piece of graphite, and were left with a single atom thick, two dimensional film
of carbon - graphene.
Graphene is a novel two-dimensional material which can be seen as a
monolayer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice.
It possesses a number of unique properties, such as extremely high
electron and thermal conductivities due to very high velocities of electrons
and high quality of the crystals, as well as mechanical strength.
Professor Novoselov said: "Although the exciting physics which we
have found in this particular experiment may have an immediate implementation
in practical electronic devices, the further understanding of the electronic
properties of this material will bring us a step closer to the development of
graphene electronics."
Professor Geim added: "The progress have been possible due to
quantum leap in improvement of the sample quality which could be produced at
The University of
Manchester ."
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