Graphene

[bandwraith at aol.com]

Well written, thank you. Two comments. The first, practically speaking-
the move from lab to the market (or military deployment) does take
time, but in certain areas, change has become more exponential and less
linear, so we might see some manifestations on our scatterbrain scale
ahead of time. Second, and more metaphysical- the amazing strength of
the sp2 bond is based on "sharing."


-----Original Message-----
From: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>
To: 'Prashant Kumar' <siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com>; 'rich'
<richard.romeo at gmail.com>
Cc: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sat, Jan 12, 2013 12:45 pm
Subject: RE: Graphene



What Prashant said. As quantum theory emerged a century ago, we were
struck by its “weirdness”: entities, properties and behaviors very
different from, even  flatly contradictory to,  those of the
macroscopic sensory world. At the same time, physicists knew that
somehow the e, p and b we know must be consistent with and built up out
of the quantum e, p and b. Some of that building-up is just statistics:
a thin layer of glass or rubber is still an insulator for all
technological purposes even if quantum mechanics shows that one in
10-to-the-umpteenth-power electrons “tunnels” right through it. We came
late to the weirdness because it’s almost always smeared out, averaged
away, drowned out, over the quintillions of atoms/molecules in even the
tiniest amount of stuff – “condensed matter,” not hot sodium atoms
floating alone in near-vacuum or electrons streaming through a CRT –
that we typically work with.
 
All sorts of things happen in the many orders of magnitude between
quantum and everyday phenomena. For one, the engineering materials we
work with are typically much weaker than would be expected from the
strength of the chemical (= electric charge = quantum-mechanical) bonds
between their atoms and molecules. Look at the scales in between, and
the purest metal, the most perfect-looking crystal, is shot through
with flaws, dislocations,  grain boundaries: places where the
quantum-level bonds are interrupted. So the bulk material’s strength
(and conductivity and other bond-dependent properties) typically
reflect those “weakest link” numbers, not the atom-to-atom properties.
 
What makes graphene, carbon nanotubes, and buckyballs special is that
physics and experimental craft combine to make them damn near perfect.
The sp2 bond between two carbon atoms is already very strong as
interatomic bonds go; with the right conditions and catalysts, hot
carbon atoms flying around in a reaction vessel are far more likely to
form that bond over and over and over in a hexagonal chicken-wire
pattern than any other: one perfect bond after another extending over
huge numbers of atoms– rolled into spheres for buckyballs, into
cylinders as nanotubes, or spread out in sheets as graphene. They can
have not only macroscopic-scale strength approaching the strength of
the carbon bonds, but other quantum-mechanical properties – some of
them weird -- “writ large.” (Very important caveat: as Prashant sez, it
can take decades to turn lab-scale capabilities into affordable
industrial-scale production. Everything a transistor does was implicit
in the physics of 1925, but we didn’t make the first one until the late
1940s, and it decades and billion$ more to Intel Everygoddamnwhere.)   
 
We trawl down into rigorous, invisible, weird perfection and drag it up
into our loveable, scatterbrained world: too late for TRP, but someday
some writer will do with all this what he has done with
late-19th-century chemistry, electromagnetism and math. Not that it
matters -- as Alice will doubtless assure us, it’s the merest
scrimshaw.  
 
 
 
 From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
Behalf Of Prashant Kumar
Sent: Friday, January 11, 2013 8:31 PM
To: rich
Cc: “pynchon-l at waste.org“
Subject: Re: Graphene
 
That's right. The only way we would be able to build such a thing, by
layering graphene sheets over graphene sheets, would just give us
graphite - the stuff in a pencil. Most of the technological and
physical properties result from the fact that graphene is a single
layer of carbon atoms. 

 

Now, given magic/aliens, we could imagine wrapping up these graphene
sheets - into carbon nanotubes - and putting them together into a
pencil. But even then, we would see changes in electronic properties.
This, by the way, is a dream of condensed matter physics --
programmable matter. 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_matter

 

P. 

On Saturday, 12 January 2013, rich wrote:
The media does seem to overblow scientific breakthroughs so-called.

dumb question: are you saying scaling graphene would essentially
change it into something that isn't graphene anymore or does not have
the same physical properties? sorry, the only chemistry I've learned
in the last decade is from watching Breaking Bad ;)

rich

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 8:36 PM, Prashant Kumar
<siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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> 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> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> the "new plastic".
>> >> for those better equipped to explian it would u consider graphene
a
>> >> potential bleeding edge technology?
>> >
>> >