| TG Daily | - |
It's
really, really thin. It's tough as lead boots. It's sexy. It's
graphene. And, the science world gets all hot and heavy when it is
around.
Graphene: the sexy, thin supermodel queen of the material world
It's
really, really thin. It's tough as lead boots. It's sexy. It's
graphene. And, the science world gets all hot and heavy when it is
around. Brainiacs just love the super-material.
It is a one-atom thick carbon-based material that is now recognized
as the thinnest and strongest material in the world. And if that wasn't
enough, it can conduct electricity as well as copper. It is a miracle
material that will make the Internet go faster, and eventually let us see astronauts dressed in skintight suits instead of looking like they were swallowed by the Michelin homme.
As we reporter earlier,
graphene has extreme conductivity and is completely transparent while
being inexpensive and nontoxic. This makes it a perfect candidate
material for transparent contact layers for use in solar cells to
conduct electricity without reducing the amount of incoming light - at
least in theory.
Now a research team at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colo., may help
bring graphene's promise closer to reality. While searching for an
ideal growth platform for the material, investigators developed a
promising new recipe for a graphene substrate: a thin film of copper
with massive crystalline grains. The team's findings appear in the
journal AIP Advances.
The key advance is the grain size of the copper substrate. The
large grains are several centimeters in size – massive by
microelectronics standards – but their relative bulk enables them to
survive the high temperatures needed for graphene growth.
The inability of most copper films to survive this stage of
graphene growth "has been one problem preventing wafer-scale production
of graphene devices," said NIST researcher Max Keller.
Thin films are an essential component of many electronic, optical,
and medical technologies, but the grains in these films are typically
smaller than one micrometer. To fabricate the new copper surface, whose
grains are about 10,000 times larger, the researchers came up with a
two-step process.
First, they deposited copper onto a sapphire wafer held slightly
above room temperature. Second, they added the transformative step of
annealing, or heat-treating, the film at a much higher temperature, near
the melting point of copper. To demonstrate the viability of their
giant-grained film, the researchers successfully grew graphene grains
0.2 millimeters in diameter on the new copper surface.
So, graphene is not theoretically great. It is great. And as atomic
materials go, it is damn sexy. I bet you want some, don't you? You know
you do.
Read more at http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences-features/82312-graphene-the-sexy-thin-supermodel-queen-of-the-material-world#scZYMdYMmLvEUSSk.99
Graphene: the sexy, thin supermodel queen of the material world
It's
really, really thin. It's tough as lead boots. It's sexy. It's
graphene. And, the science world gets all hot and heavy when it is
around. Brainiacs just love the super-material.
It is a one-atom thick carbon-based material that is now recognized
as the thinnest and strongest material in the world. And if that wasn't
enough, it can conduct electricity as well as copper. It is a miracle
material that will make the Internet go faster, and eventually let us see astronauts dressed in skintight suits instead of looking like they were swallowed by the Michelin homme.
As we reporter earlier,
graphene has extreme conductivity and is completely transparent while
being inexpensive and nontoxic. This makes it a perfect candidate
material for transparent contact layers for use in solar cells to
conduct electricity without reducing the amount of incoming light - at
least in theory.
Now a research team at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colo., may help
bring graphene's promise closer to reality. While searching for an
ideal growth platform for the material, investigators developed a
promising new recipe for a graphene substrate: a thin film of copper
with massive crystalline grains. The team's findings appear in the
journal AIP Advances.
The key advance is the grain size of the copper substrate. The
large grains are several centimeters in size – massive by
microelectronics standards – but their relative bulk enables them to
survive the high temperatures needed for graphene growth.
The inability of most copper films to survive this stage of
graphene growth "has been one problem preventing wafer-scale production
of graphene devices," said NIST researcher Max Keller.
Thin films are an essential component of many electronic, optical,
and medical technologies, but the grains in these films are typically
smaller than one micrometer. To fabricate the new copper surface, whose
grains are about 10,000 times larger, the researchers came up with a
two-step process.
First, they deposited copper onto a sapphire wafer held slightly
above room temperature. Second, they added the transformative step of
annealing, or heat-treating, the film at a much higher temperature, near
the melting point of copper. To demonstrate the viability of their
giant-grained film, the researchers successfully grew graphene grains
0.2 millimeters in diameter on the new copper surface.
So, graphene is not theoretically great. It is great. And as atomic
materials go, it is damn sexy. I bet you want some, don't you? You know
you do.
Read more at http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences-features/82312-graphene-the-sexy-thin-supermodel-queen-of-the-material-world#scZYMdYMmLvEUSSk.99
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