Scientists at UCL have explained for the first time the mystery of why adhesive tape is so useful for graphene production. The study, published in Advanced Materials, used supercomputers to model the process through which graphene sheets are exfoliated from graphite, the material in pencils.
Many of you will know about graphene and how it has been touted as the new wonder material that will change the face of many nanotechnology applications. Whilst graphene is the most promising in terms of its commercial potential, there are a host of other 2D materials out there with amazing properties that are still relatively unheard of in the scientific community. For clarification, a material is considered to be 2-dimensional when they are a single atomic layer with their electrons confined to 2-dimensional space.
Sir Kostya Novoselov told the BBC that many scientists were dependent on funding from Europe and the UK needed to be much more proactive in supporting technology companies if it wanted to compete with China.
The Graphene Pavilion at the GSMA Mobile World Congress has showcased two fascinating graphene-based photonics devices. The first is said to be the world’s first all-graphene optical communication link operating at a data rate of 25 Gb/s per channel, and the second one, displayed at the Ericsson stand, is the first ultra-fast graphene-based photonic switch in an Ericsson testbed. These graphene-based photonic devices may become the building blocks of the next generation of mobile networks.
Rice University scientists, led by Prof. James Tour, along with teams from the University of Texas at San Antonio and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China have detected a deception in graphene catalysts that, until now, gone unnoticed. Graphene has been widely tested as a replacement for expensive platinum in applications like fuel cells, where the material catalyzes the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) essential to turn chemical energy into electrical energy.
Researchers from the UCLA, Mississippi State Universitym University of Nevada and China’s Central South have designed an efficient and long-lasting graphene-based electrode for supercapacitors. The device’s design was inspired by the structure and function of leaves on tree branches, and it is said to be more than 10 times more efficient than other designs.
Scientists from St. Petersburg University and Tomsk University in Russia, along with teams at the Max Planck Institute in Germany and University of the Basque Country, Spain, have modified graphene in such a way that it has taken the properties of cobalt and gold: magnetism and spin–orbit interaction. This advance can greatly benefit quantum computers.
A research team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has placed armchair-edge graphene nanoribbons (AGNRs) on a gold surface. Since AGNRs become semiconductors at certain widths, this structure may offer advantages in speed, heat dissipation and power consumption in electronic devices and create new research paths in spintronics.
A team led by researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Bombay, India, has developed a graphene-enhanced inexpensive, flexible pressure sensor that can be used for various health-care applications. The piezoresistive pressure sensor can reportedly monitor even small-scale movements caused by low-pressure variations.
Researchers from the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus has created a graphene-based wearable device capable of sensing and understanding complex human motion. This could lead to a practical way to monitor and interpret human motion, in what may become the next generation of health monitors.