Graphene

[Prashant Kumar]

Unfortunately the elephant-pencil thing (in SciAm, right?) thing is
somewhat specious, in that "graphene" as thick as a pencil is just
graphite. Alien-tech-level methods of fabricating such a thing
notwithstanding, scaling up the mechanical properties of graphene in such a
way would result in changes in physical structure which would nullify the
technological applications.

P.

On Friday, 11 January 2013, rich wrote:

> thanks man
>
> I need a science guy to help me out. I did like the elephant and
> pencil analogy. guess graphene replacing silicon is many years away.
>
> rich
>
> On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 9:32 PM, Prashant Kumar
> <siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com <javascript:;>> wrote:
> > 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 <javascript:;>>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> the "new plastic".
> >> for those better equipped to explian it would u consider graphene a
> >> potential bleeding edge technology?
> >
> >
>
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