Graphene's 'Quantum Leap' To Revolutionize Electronics

Nobel Prize winning scientists Professor Andre Geim and Professor Kostya Novoselov have taken a giant stride forward towards creating electronics from wonder material graphene. Penning in the journal Nature Physics, the academics, who discovered the world's thinnest material at The University of Manchester in 2004, have revealed more about its electronic properties.

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Graphene 2-Dimensional crystal

Various researchers around the world are already looking at methods to build devices such as touch-screens, ultrafast transistors and photodetectors. Now the research from the creators of the material assures to accelerate that research, and potentially open up infinitely more electronic opportunities. The researchers, from the universities of Manchester, Madrid and Moscow, have examined in detail the effect of interactions among electrons on the electronic properties of graphene. They used extremely high-quality graphene devices which were prepared by suspending sheets of graphene in a vacuum. This way most of the undesirable scattering mechanisms for electrons in graphene could be decimated, thus enhancing the effect of electron-on-electron interaction. This is the first effect of its kind where the interactions between electrons in graphene could be clearly witnessed.

The cause for such unique electronic properties is that electrons in this material are very dissimilar from those in any other metals. They mimic mass-less relativistic particles, such as photons. Due to such properties graphene is sometimes called 'CERN on a desk', referring the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. This is just one of the reasons why the electronic properties are specially exciting and often bring surprises.

Professor Geim and Professor Novoselov's initiating work won them the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 for "groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene." The duo, who've worked together for more than a decade since Professor Novoselov was Professor Geim's PHD student, used to devote every Friday evening to 'out of the box' experiments not directly linked to their main research topics. One Friday, they employed Scotch tape to peel away layers of carbon from a piece of graphite, and were left with a single atom thick, two dimensional film of carbon, what we now know as graphene.

Graphene is a new two-dimensional material which can be seen as a mono-layer of carbon atoms aligned in a hexagonal lattice. It has a number of unique properties, such as extremely high electron and thermal conductivities due to very high velocities of electrons and high quality of the crystals, as well as mechanical strength. Professor Novoselov said: "Although the exciting physics which we have found in this particular experiment may have an immediate implementation in practical electronic devices, the further understanding of the electronic properties of this material will bring us a step closer to the development of graphene electronics."

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