Graphene

[Prashant Kumar]

For those who don't know, graphene is basically a single-atom thick layer
of graphite with some very interesting physical properties. Basically,
under certain conditions, you can force the charge carriers, erstwhile
electrons, to behave as different kinds of particles, which results in a
range of physically and technologically interesting phenomena.

I  would argue that, all things considered, graphene is not bleeding edge;
more properly *emerging.* It's not a technology in the sense a layman would
recognise: it's reasonably far away from commercial application. Problem is
with fabrication of suitable samples. The guys at Manchester who won the
Nobel in Physics last year used what's now called the "Scotch tape" method.
You get a sample of graphite and "exfoliate" (read stick it on and then
peel it off) a layer of graphene. This is one of the most efficient methods
known. However, graphene in this state is brittle, so there's problems
scaling up.  Many of the really cool things you can do right now have also
been demonstrated in other materials.

Graphene electronics proper is I think maybe a decade or so away. Even then
I think deployment of graphene will be in concert with other tech, most
exciting of which is perhaps "spintronics". If an electron is spinning
clockwise, it has spin down, anticlockwise, spin up. The idea is you run
circuits using spin information. This allows for very interesting circuits,
where information can flow both ways along a single line. Cool think about
graphene here is that it exhibits such effects at room temperature, where
every other material needs superconducting (~1-2K) temperatures, which
limits commercial utility.

P.

On 8 January 2013 07:00, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> the "new plastic".
> for those better equipped to explian it would u consider graphene a
> potential bleeding edge technology?
>
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