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Bilayer Graphene Works as an Insulator: Research Has Potential Applications in Digital and Infrared Technologies

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January 24, 2012 – Comments (2)

I have been following graphene articles (casually) for a few years. It really is a fascinating substance. And this is very interesting (and cool) development which will likely have very tangible application in several years.

binve hearts graphene :)

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Bilayer Graphene Works as an Insulator: Research Has Potential Applications in Digital and Infrared Technologies
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120124150413.htm

ScienceDaily (Jan. 24, 2012) — A research team led by physicists at the University of California, Riverside has identified a property of "bilayer graphene" (BLG) that the researchers say is analogous to finding the Higgs boson in particle physics.

Graphene, nature's thinnest elastic material, is a one-atom thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. Because of graphene's planar and chicken wire-like structure, sheets of it lend themselves well to stacking.

BLG is formed when two graphene sheets are stacked in a special manner. Like graphene, BLG has high current-carrying capacity, also known as high electron conductivity. The high current-carrying capacity results from the extremely high velocities that electrons can acquire in a graphene sheet.

The physicists report online Jan. 22 in Nature Nanotechnology that in investigating BLG's properties they found that when the number of electrons on the BLG sheet is close to 0, the material becomes insulating (that is, it resists flow of electrical current) -- a finding that has implications for the use of graphene as an electronic material in the semiconductor and electronics industries.

2 Comments – Post Your Own

#1) On January 24, 2012 at 5:39 PM, Option1307 (30.51) wrote:

Really cool stuff, +1.

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#2) On January 27, 2012 at 3:07 AM, mhy729 (41.43) wrote:

Graphene creator in new discovery

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5ifE2lLgcgRKGQdSSONZQAyHWB_Ew?docId=N0155081327595743813A 

[selected excerpts below]

Graphene is the thinnest material known and the strongest ever measured. It also conducts electricity and heat better than any other material. Potential applications include fold-away mobile phones, wallpaper-thin lighting panels and the next generation of aircraft.

A team led by Sir Andre has now shown that graphene membranes shut out all gases and liquids except for water. As far as water alone is concerned, they are "superpermeable". Water evaporates through a graphite membrane so fast it is as if no barrier was there at all.

"Helium gas is hard to stop," said Sir Andre. "It slowly leaks even through a millimetre-thick window glass but our ultra-thin films completely block it. At the same time, water evaporates through them unimpeded. Materials cannot behave any stranger." 

"Just for a laugh, we sealed a bottle of vodka with our membranes and found that the distilled solution became stronger and stronger with time," said co-author Dr Rahul Nair. "Neither of us drinks vodka but it was great fun to do the experiment."

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Every student in chemistry class knows that carbon and water each have quite special properties, but all this cool research indicates that they can still surprise us with newly-discovered features.

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