MY NOTE: ALTHOUGH THIS INTERESTING ARTICLE DOESN'T SPECIFICALLY REFERENCE IT, GRAPHENE IS A PRIME CANDIDATE FOR USE IN SCANNING TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FUTURE, INCLUDING THz, AS REFLECTED IN A SERIES OF POSTS ON THIS BLOG, WHICH CAN BE ACCESSED UNDER THE TOPIC GRAPHENE.
BANGALORE: Try this exercise when you have a few minutes to spare. Type the term 'wonder material' onGoogle and see what you get. Five or six years back you would have ended up with an assorted list, not at all wondrous and some of them even fancies of marginal scientists and inventors. Now you will have to go way down in the list of search results to spot anything other than one substance, graphene.Microsoft Office would still tell you that you are spelling the word wrong, as the program confuses it with the word 'grapheme' used in linguistics, but material graphene has set the world's laboratories on fire. It will soon start restructuring major industries worth several hundred billion dollars.
Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms networked in a honeycomb structure. It is super-strong and super-thin, and shows extraordinary electric and optical properties. Discovered only in 2004, graphene has been used already in labs to make transistors, memory devices, transparent and flexible displays, high capacity batteries, solar cells, energy storage devices and several other things. These devices show remarkable properties when compared to what we use now, but graphene manufacturing technology has to develop over the next few years before they make it to the commercial world. "I am surprised at the pace of development of graphene-based devices," says Konstantin Novoselov, professor of physics at the University of Manchester, and a co-discoverer. "It is because quite a few scientists are now working on the material."
Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms networked in a honeycomb structure. It is super-strong and super-thin, and shows extraordinary electric and optical properties. Discovered only in 2004, graphene has been used already in labs to make transistors, memory devices, transparent and flexible displays, high capacity batteries, solar cells, energy storage devices and several other things. These devices show remarkable properties when compared to what we use now, but graphene manufacturing technology has to develop over the next few years before they make it to the commercial world. "I am surprised at the pace of development of graphene-based devices," says Konstantin Novoselov, professor of physics at the University of Manchester, and a co-discoverer. "It is because quite a few scientists are now working on the material."
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Novoselov and his former professor Andre Geim, also of Manchester University, had won the Physics Nobel Prize last year for their discovery. The duo now continues to be a rich source of new grapheme science and technology. Last week they published the results of research that showed ways of using graphene to convert light into electric pulses at high speeds, a development that could result in better solar cells and 10-100 times faster Internet. Their paper was among the many in recent times that described exciting developments in the world of graphene, as scientists and engineers started moving basic research into lab-scale development. "Over 200 patents have been granted on graphene since its discovery," says Ajay Sood, professor of physics at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. "This shows the extent of commercial interest in the material."
Sood himself has made transistors and memory devices using graphene. Although graphene is unlikely to replace silicon in transistors in the near future, graphene-based transistors are lightning fast when compared to the silicon-based ones that computers use now. Two months ago, in an important step towards developing commercial grapheme devices, IBM demonstrated a graphene-based integrated circuit (IC) that worked at frequencies of 10 gigahertz. Graphene could give us chips that work at terahertz (1000 gigahertz) frequencies, and is a replacement for silicon.
IBM had made an isolated graphene transistor last year working at 100 gigahertz, but this time it had shown how to connect it with other materials in a broadband mixer, a basic component of radios. Novoselov and Geim first made graphene by peeling off thin layers of carbon from graphite using scotch tape, after others failed to do so using advanced equipment and large sums of money.
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