Graphene is the future
Graphene is probably the most fascinating material of the twenty-first century and will probably become a vital part of our lives in the future. It is basically a one atom thick sheet of Carbon atoms that are loosely bonded, but it has some incredibly useful properties that scientists are beginning to understand.
The history of Graphene is relatively short as it was first theorized in 1947 (which led to some people believing it may have been found at the Roswell crash site) however at the time it was not thought that it could exist in the real world. Despite this in 2004 a team which was later awarded the Noble Prize for Physics was able to demonstrate that it could exist in a single sheet. The sheets developed are also incredibly thin and it would take three million sheets to make the material 1mm thick.
Not only is it incredibly thin it is also incredibly strong. A one meter square sheet would weigh the same amount as a cat’s whisker however it would be able to quite easily support the weight of an average cat. It will also happily keeps its state so it is actually possible to pick up a single sheet.
As well as being incredibly strong it also conducts electricity better than copper which could lead to be it being a replacement for silicon in the future (which we will probably need as silicon supplies are running out) and IBM are already using it to produce a 140 GHz transistor - although some scientists believe that it may have an unlimited speed. The only issue is that it is also the best conductor of heat known to man so cooling may be an issue.
Despite the fact some scientists think that the technology is over hyped its potential is clearly great and many governments have noticed this with vast sums of money being put into research. The two scientists at Manchester University that developed Graphene and won the Noble prize are being knighted by the Queen.
LG plans to have Graphene based products available within five years and I would suggest that it is a smart move.
Bilayer Graphene Works as an Insulator: Research Has Potential Applications in Digital and Infrared Technologies
sciencedaily.com
A scanning electron microscope image of a graphene sheet (red) suspended between two electrodes. The length of the graphene sheet shown is about 1/100 of the width of a human hair. (Credit: Lau lab, UC Riverside)
A research team led by physicists at the University of California, Riverside has identified a property of “bilayer graphene” (BLG) that the researchers say is analogous to finding the Higgs boson in particle physics.
Graphene, nature’s thinnest elastic material, is a one-atom thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. Because of graphene’s planar and chicken wire-like structure, sheets of it lend themselves well to stacking.
BLG is formed when two graphene sheets are stacked in a special manner. Like graphene, BLG has high current-carrying capacity, also known as high electron conductivity. The high current-carrying capacity results from the extremely high velocities that electrons can acquire in a graphene sheet.
The physicists report online Jan. 22 in Nature Nanotechnology that in investigating BLG’s properties they found that when the number of electrons on the BLG sheet is close to 0, the material becomes insulating (that is, it resists flow of electrical current) — a finding that has implications for the use of graphene as an electronic material in the semiconductor and electronics industries.
“BLG becomes insulating because its electrons spontaneously organize themselves when their number is small,” said Chun Ning (Jeanie) Lau, an associate professor of physics and astronomy and the lead author of the research paper. “Instead of moving around randomly, the electrons move in an orderly fashion. This is called ‘spontaneous symmetry breaking’ in physics, and is a very important concept since it is the same principle that ‘endows’ mass for particles in high energy physics.”
Lau explained that a typical conductor has a huge number of electrons, which move around randomly, rather like a party with ten thousand guests with no assigned seats at dining tables. If the party only has four guests, however, then the guests will have to interact with each other and sit down at a table. Similarly, when BLG has only a few electrons the interactions cause the electrons to behave in an orderly manner.
New quantum particle
Allan MacDonald, the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair in the Department of Physics at The University of Texas at Austin and a coauthor on the research paper, noted that team has measured the mass of a new type of massive quantum particle that can be found only inside BLG crystals.
“The physics which gives these particles their mass is closely analogous to the physics which makes the mass of a proton inside an atomic nucleus very much larger than the mass of the quarks from which it is formed,” he said. “Our team’s particle is made of electrons, however, not quarks.”
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