Graphene

[Monte Davis]

The exponential progress has been concentrated in information technology, which is unique in that it manipulates *patterns.* The stuff that embodies the patterns is irrelevant, as long as you can write, store and read 0s and 1s reliably. So you can go from relays to vacuum tubes to transistors to electron spins -- using less matter and energy per operation, while getting faster and more reliable (fewer moving parts, less heat etc). That has some commonality with writing/printing/publishing and broadcasting,  but most other technologies do have to push around macroscopic amounts of matter and energy. Even if we could fabricate 10,000 perfect little wheelbarrows, oil tankers, or steam turbines on a chip, they couldn't do the tasks the full-size ones do, because scale matters for those tasks in a way that it doesn't matter for logical operations. As Ralph Gomory at IBM pointed out a long time ago, if you take the materials in a 2000-lb automobile and use them to make 2000 perfect miniatures, they're toys:  you can't ride in them. But do the same with a 2000-lb computer, and you get 2000 fully functional (probably *better*) computers.


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of bandwraith at aol.com
Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2013 2:01 PM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: Graphene

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?
>> >
>> >