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April 18, 2010
Graphene Advances
Mass produced graphene Transistors just got a little closer with this laboratory advance in graphene film fabrication. "Before we can fully utilize the superior electronic properties of graphene in devices, we must first develop a method of forming uniform single-layer graphene films on nonconducting substrates on a large scale," says Yuegang Zhang, a materials scientist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Current fabrication methods based on mechanical cleavage or ultrahigh vacuum annealing, he says, are ill-suited for commercial-scale production. Graphene films made via solution-based deposition and chemical reduction have suffered from poor or uneven quality.It is always nice to have a process that just needs to be adjusted. Even nicer is that it is a production process. There are probably 1,000 more steps like that required before your next microprocessor is made of charcoal (with a few enhancements). Graphene has some exceptional properties. In a semiconductor there is a quadratic relationship between the energy and momentum of the electrons. But in graphene that relationship is linear. Papers #2 (Geim's group) and #3 (Philip Kim's group, Columbia University, New York), published side by side in Nature, report on an important consequence of the linear relationship. They independently discovered that electrons move through the films as if they have no mass. That's because the energy-momentum relationship means that electron transport is governed by the relativistic Dirac equation.I think massless electrons could come in quite handy. Provided you could produce them on demand and control them. You know. Power and Control. Here is a fairly recent book on the subject that may help you get up to speed: H/T DavidWillard at Talk Polywell Cross Posted at Power and Control posted by Simon on 04.18.10 at 10:43 AM |
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