Hi. I'm sure not that many of you have heard of
graphene. Well, graphene is a allotrope of a carbon, same like graphite and diamond. The graphene has
sp2-bonded carbon which is only one atom in thickness that arrange itself in highly dense honeycomb lattice. Graphene was discovered by Professor Andre Geim who won the Physics Nobel Prize together with Professor Konstantin Novoselov in 2010.
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| Atomic scale of honeycomb lattice exhibit by graphene material |
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| Andre Geim |
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| Konstantin Novoselov |
Some of the unique properties of graphene includes its high electron mobility and the breaking strength that is 200 times greater than steel. Some researchers claim that graphene is harder than diamond. As for right now, the process of getting graphene to split from a layer of graphite only occurs naturally, so the advancement in harvesting graphene for our purposes can't be made, although this will change in near future as more and more effort is putting into making graphene a potential powerful material for electronic devices.
The most prominent usage of graphene is a nanoscale transistor, made reliable because of its small size and its property to conduct electricity far better than silicon. In the future, many researchers believe that silicon will be replaced by graphene in all electronic devices as graphene provides better electrical conductivity as compared to silicon. It is also believe that graphene can help the computer's calculation faster than what we have now and make new and complex calculations render possible.
Other usage of graphene includes the single gas molecule detector, transparent conducting electrodes, solar cells and many more. In recent news, scientists tried to make a paper that is stronger than steel by reforming and reshaping the mother material graphite to produce graphene paper. These paper will have an exceptional thermal, electrical and mechanical properties.
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| Graphene paper sample. Picture by Lisa Aloisio |
If you want to read more about breakthrough that's already been achieved in graphene research, you can go
here and type graphene in the search box. You can also go to
google and refine the search into pdf format as scientists usually published their papers and findings in that format. I think that is all for today. Thanks for reading!!
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