Graphene paper

Pretty cool.

From the link:

A scanning electron microscopy (SEM) image of graphene oxide papers and an analytical model showing the layered structures of graphene sheets, the intralayer and interlayer crosslinks, and an atomic representation of the bridging structure (credit: Yilun Liu et al.)

Scientists at Tsinghua University in Beijing have calculated from first principles what a sheet of graphene might be like.

It’s currently only possible to make graphene in tiny scraps. So they suggest ways to stack these sheets and bond them together to make something larger.

Their model predicts the links between graphene layers will increase the distance between them, thereby reducing the density to about half that of graphite. So graphene paper is not only going to be strong but also very light.

Cool nanotech image — graphene transistors

The article connected to the image is pretty good, too.

Triple transistor: Single graphene transistors like this one can be made to operate in three modes and perform functions that usually require multiple transistors in a circuit. Credit: Alexander Balandin

Also from the link:

Researchers have already made blisteringly fast graphene transistors. Now they’ve used graphene to make a transistor that can be switched between three different modes of operation, which in conventional circuits must be performed by three separate transistors. These configurable transistors could lead to more compact chips for sending and receiving wireless signals.

Chips that use fewer transistors while maintaining all the same functions could be less expensive, use less energy, and free up room inside portable electronics like smart phones, where space is tight. The new graphene transistor is an analog device, of the type that’s used for wireless communications in Bluetooth headsets and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags.

 

Mass producing graphene

News from the University of Houston:

University of Houston professor taking next step with graphene research

The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics went to the two scientists who first isolated graphene, one-atom-thick crystals of graphite. Now, a researcher with the University of Houston Cullen College of Engineering is trying to develop a method to mass-produce this revolutionary material.

Graphene has several properties that make it different from literally everything else on Earth: it is the first two-dimensional material ever developed; the world’s thinnest and strongest material; the best conductor of heat ever found; a far better conductor of electricity than copper; it is virtually transparent; and is so dense that no gas can pass through it. These properties make graphene a game changer for everything from energy storage devices to flat device displays.

Most importantly, perhaps, is graphene’s potential as a replacement for silicon in computer chips. The properties of graphene would enable the historical growth in computing power to continue for decades to come.

To realize these benefits, though, a way to create plentiful, defect-free graphene must be developed. Qingkai Yu, an assistant research professor with the college’s department of electrical and computer engineering and the university’s Center for Advanced Materials, is developing methods to mass-produce such high-quality graphene.

Yu is using a technology known as chemical vapor deposition. During this process, he heats methane to around 1000 degrees Celsius, breaking the gas down into its building blocks of carbon and hydrogen atoms. The carbon atoms then attach to a metallic surface to form graphene.

“This approach could produce cheap, high-quality graphene on a large scale,” Yu said.

Yu first demonstrated the viability of chemical vapor deposition for graphene creation two years ago in a paper in the journal Applied Physics Letters. He has since continued working to perfect this method.

Yu’s initial research would often result in several layers of graphene stacked together on a nickel surface. He subsequently discovered the effectiveness of copper for graphene creation. Copper has since been adopted by graphene researchers worldwide.

Yu’s work is not finished. The single layers of graphene he is now able to create are formed out of multiple graphene crystals that join together as they grow. The places where these crystals combine, known as the grain boundaries, are defects that limit the usefulness of graphene, particularly as a replacement for silicon-based computer chips.

Yu is attempting to create large layers of graphene that form out of a single crystal.

“You can imagine how important this sort of graphene is,” said Yu. “Semiconductors became a multibillion-dollar industry based on single-crystal silicon and graphene is called the post-silicon-era material. So single-crystal graphene is the Holy Grail for the next age of semiconductors.”

 

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Yu is conducting his research in collaboration with UH Ph.D. students Wei Wu and Zhihua Su as well as postdoctoral researcher Zhihong Liu. These efforts have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Energy, SEMATECH and the UH Center for Advanced Materials.

 

Cool nanotech image — graphene

Actually the accompanying article is pretty cool, too, so do take the time to check it out.

But now, the image …

This image of a single suspended sheet of graphene taken with the TEAM 0.5, at Berkeley Lab’s National Center for Electron Microscopy shows individual carbon atoms (yellow) on the honeycomb lattice.

Also from the link:

In the current study, the team made graphene nanoribbons using a nanowire mask-based fabrication technique. By measuring the conductance fluctuation, or ‘noise’ of electrons in graphene nanoribbons, the researchers directly probed the effect of quantum confinement in these structures. Their findings map the electronic band structure of these graphene nanoribbons using a robust electrical probing method. This method can be further applied to a wide array of nanoscale materials, including graphene-based electronic devices.

“It amazes us to observe such a clear correlation between the noise and the band structure of these graphene nanomaterials,” says lead author Guangyu Xu, a physicist at University of California, Los Angeles. “This work adds strong support to the quasi-one-dimensional subband formation in graphene nanoribbons, in which our method turns out to be much more robust than conductance measurement.”

One more bit from the link, from the intro actually:

In last week’s announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences lauded graphene’s “exceptional properties that originate from the remarkable world of quantum physics.” If it weren’t hot enough before, this atomically thin sheet of carbon is now officially in the global spotlight.

So expect to hear a lot more about graphene in the coming months. Of course if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve been getting a pretty steady (aside from the last month of light blogging) diet of graphene since almost day one (since February 2008 to be exact).

Graphene could speed up DNA sequencing

I’ve blogged on this topic before (and on this very news bit in the second post from the link), but this just reiterates the versatility of graphene and why the material has so many scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs so excited.

From the second link:

By drilling a tiny pore just a few-nanometers in diameter, called a nanopore, in the graphene membrane, they were able to measure exchange of ions through the pore and demonstrated that a long DNA molecule can be pulled through the graphene nanopore just as a thread is pulled through the eye of a needle.

“By measuring the flow of ions passing through a nanopore drilled in graphene we have demonstrated that the thickness of graphene immersed in liquid is less then 1 nm thick, or many times thinner than the very thin membrane which separates a single animal or human cell from its surrounding environment,” says lead author Slaven Garaj, a Research Associate in the Department of Physics at Harvard. “This makes graphene the thinnest membrane able to separate two liquid compartments from each other. The thickness of the membrane was determined by its interaction with water molecules and ions.”

Graphene research may lead to electronics improvement

A fairly radical improvement. Try highly efficient, very-low-heat producing and smaller electronics devices. I enjoy blogging about nanotech research with real promise for market applications.

From the link:

NIST recently constructed the world’s most powerful and stable scanning-probe microscope, with an unprecedented combination of low temperature (as low as 10 millikelvin, or 10 thousandths of a degree above absolute zero), ultra-high vacuum and high magnetic field. In the first measurements made with this instrument, the team has used its power to resolve the finest differences in the electron energies in graphene, atom-by-atom.

“Going to this resolution allows you to see new physics,” said Young Jae Song, a postdoctoral researcher who helped develop the instrument at NIST and make these first measurements.

And the new physics the team saw raises a few more questions about how the electrons behave in graphene than it answers.

Because of the geometry and electromagnetic properties of graphene’s structure, an electron in any given energy level populates four possible sublevels, called a “quartet.” Theorists have predicted that this quartet of levels would split into different energies when immersed in a magnetic field, but until recently there had not been an instrument sensitive enough to resolve these differences.

“When we increased the magnetic field at extreme low temperatures, we observed unexpectedly complex quantum behavior of the electrons,” said NIST Fellow Joseph Stroscio.

What is happening, according to Stroscio, appears to be a “many-body effect” in which electrons interact strongly with one another in ways that affect their energy levels.

Graphene transistors hit 300 GHz

Via KurzweilAI.net — Great news, but as always I’d love to see a market-ready application come out of this research in the near future. Blogging about nanotech breakthroughs is all well and good, but it is excellent when I get the chance to blog about a real-world application of said breakthroughs.

From the link:

High-speed graphene transistors achieve world-record 300 GHz

September 3, 2010 by Editor

UCLA researchers have fabricated the fastest  graphene transistor to date, using a new fabrication process with a  nanowire as a self-aligned gate.

Self-aligned gates are a key element in modern transistors, which are semiconductor devices used to amplify and switch electronic signals.  Gates are used to switch the transistor between various states, and self-aligned gates were developed to deal with problems of misalignment encountered because of the shrinking scale of electronics.

“This new strategy overcomes two limitations previously encountered in graphene transistors,” professor of chemistry and biochemistry Xiangfeng Duan said. “First, it doesn’t produce any appreciable defects in the graphene during fabrication, so the high carrier mobility is retained. Second, by using a self-aligned approach with a nanowire as the gate, the group was able to overcome alignment difficulties previously encountered and fabricate very short-channel devices with unprecedented performance.”

These advances allowed the team to demonstrate the highest speed graphene transistors to date, with a cutoff frequency up to 300 GHz — comparable to the very best transistors from high-electron mobility materials such gallium arsenide or indium phosphide.

Graphene, a one-atom-thick layer of graphitic carbon, has great potential to make electronic devices such as radios, computers and phones faster and smaller. With the highest known carrier mobility — the speed at which electronic information is transmitted by a material — graphene is a good candidate for high-speed radio-frequency electronics. High-speed radio-frequency electronics may also find wide applications in microwave communication, imaging and radar technologies.

Funding for this research came from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

More info: UCLA news

Making graphene electronics friendly

Electronics is a very attractive application for both carbon nanotubes and graphene, but graphene is proving fairly stubborn to working out in real world deployment. This news out of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory sounds very promising.

From the link:

Structural loops that sometimes form during a graphene cleaning process can render the material unsuitable for electronic applications. Overcoming these types of problems is of great interest to the electronics industry.

“Graphene is a rising star in the materials world, given its potential for use in precise electronic components like transistors or other semiconductors,” said Bobby Sumpter, a staff scientist at ORNL.

The team used quantum molecular dynamics to simulate an experimental graphene cleaning process, as discussed in a paper published in Physical Review Letters. Calculations performed on ORNL supercomputers pointed the researchers to an overlooked intermediate step during processing.

Imaging with a transmission electron microscope, or TEM, subjected the graphene to electron irradiation, which ultimately prevented loop formation. The ORNL simulations showed that by injecting electrons to collect an image, the electrons were simultaneously changing the material’s structure.

ORNL simulations demonstrate how loops (seen above in blue) between graphene layers can be minimized using electron irradiation (bottom).

Graphene and DNA sequencing

News on potential applications of graphene is always interesting, but I’ll have to admit I’d like see more actual market-ready solutions. This news is both intriguing and promising, but the nut graf contains those dreaded words, “could help (insert the gist of any story here).” It’ll be a pretty exciting day when I blog about something that will help, instead of could help with graphene as the key helping element.

From the second link:

Layers of graphene that are only as thick as an atom could help make human DNA sequencing faster and cheaper. Harvard University and MIT researchers have shown that sheets of graphene could be a big improvement over membranes that are currently used for nanopore sequencing–a technique that promises to speed up and simplify the sequencing of long strands of DNA.

And:

The researchers create their membrane by placing a graphene flake over a 200-nanometer-wide opening in the middle of a silicon-nitride surface. Then they drill a few pores, just nanometers wide, in the graphene with an electron beam. The membrane is finally immersed in a salt solution that’s in contact with silver electrodes. The researchers observed dips in the current when a DNA strand passed through the pore, showing that the method could eventually be used to identify DNA bases.

Better understanding graphene

Yes, graphene is something of a miracle material (hit this link for my extensive graphene blogging), and yes it’s proving to be very vexing material as well. There’s a whole lot of promise, but not so much practice because graphene is proving to be a very fickle material. Research like this from the Georgia Institute of Technology is particularly important because unlocking the secret life of graphene will allow for increasing practical applications. Better understanding will lead to better utilization.

The release:

Study of electron orbits in multilayer graphene finds unexpected energy gaps

Electron transport

		IMAGE: Stacking of graphene sheets creates regions where the moiré alignment is of type AA (all atoms have neighbors in the layer below), AB (only A atoms have neighbors) or BA… Click here for more information.

Researchers have taken one more step toward understanding the unique and often unexpected properties of graphene, a two-dimensional carbon material that has attracted interest because of its potential applications in future generations of electronic devices.

In the Aug. 8 advance online edition of the journal Nature Physics, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) describe for the first time how the orbits of electrons are distributed spatially by magnetic fields applied to layers of epitaxial graphene.

The research team also found that these electron orbits can interact with the substrate on which the graphene is grown, creating energy gaps that affect how electron waves move through the multilayer material. These energy gaps could have implications for the designers of certain graphene-based electronic devices.

“The regular pattern of energy gaps in the graphene surface creates regions where electron transport is not allowed,” said Phillip N. First, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics and one of the paper’s co-authors. “Electron waves would have to go around these regions, requiring new patterns of electron wave interference. Understanding such interference will be important for bi-layer graphene devices that have been proposed, and may be important for other lattice-matched substrates used to support graphene and graphene devices.”

In a magnetic field, an electron moves in a circular trajectory – known as a cyclotron orbit – whose radius depends on the size of the magnetic field and the energy of electron. For a constant magnetic field, that’s a little like rolling a marble around in a large bowl, First said.

“At high energy, the marble orbits high in the bowl, while for lower energies, the orbit size is smaller and lower in the bowl,” he explained. “The cyclotron orbits in graphene also depend on the electron energy and the local electron potential – corresponding to the bowl – but until now, the orbits hadn’t been imaged directly.”

Placed in a magnetic field, these orbits normally drift along lines of nearly constant electric potential. But when a graphene sample has small fluctuations in the potential, these “drift states” can become trapped at a hill or valley in the material that has closed constant potential contours. Such trapping of charge carriers is important for the quantum Hall effect, in which precisely quantized resistance results from charge conduction solely through the orbits that skip along the edges of the material.

		IMAGE: This graphic shows electrons that move along an equipotential, while those that follow closed equipotentials (as in a potential-energy valley) become localized (right). The arrows denote the magnetic field,… Click here for more information.

The study focused on one particular electron orbit: a zero-energy orbit that is unique to graphene. Because electrons are matter waves, interference within a material affects how their energy relates to the velocity of the wave – and reflected waves added to an incoming wave can combine to produce a slower composite wave. Electrons moving through the unique “chicken-wire” arrangement of carbon-carbon bonds in the graphene interfere in a way that leaves the wave velocity the same for all energy levels.

In addition to finding that energy states follow contours of constant electric potential, the researchers discovered specific areas on the graphene surface where the orbital energy of the electrons changes from one atom to the next. That creates an energy gap within isolated patches on the surface.

“By examining their distribution over the surface for different magnetic fields, we determined that the energy gap is due to a subtle interaction with the substrate, which consists of multilayer graphene grown on a silicon carbide wafer,” First explained.

In multilayer epitaxial graphene, each layer’s symmetrical sublattice is rotated slightly with respect to the next. In prior studies, researchers found that the rotations served to decouple the electronic properties of each graphene layer.

“Our findings hold the first indications of a small position-dependent interaction between the layers,” said David L. Miller, the paper’s first author and a graduate student in First’s laboratory. “This interaction occurs only when the size of a cyclotron orbit – which shrinks as the magnetic field is increased – becomes smaller than the size of the observed patches.”

The origin of the position dependent interaction is believed to be the “moiré pattern” of atomic alignments between two adjacent layers of graphene. In some regions, atoms of one layer lie atop atoms of the layer below, while in other regions, none of the atoms align with the atoms in the layer below. In still other regions, half of the atoms have neighbors in the underlayer, an instance in which the symmetry of the carbon atoms is broken and the Landau level – discrete energy level of the electrons – splits into two different energies.

Experimentally, the researchers examined a sample of epitaxial graphene grown at Georgia Tech in the laboratory of Professor Walt de Heer, using techniques developed by his research team over the past several years.

They used the tip of a custom-built scanning-tunneling microscope (STM) to probe the atomic-scale electronic structure of the graphene in a technique known as scanning tunneling spectroscopy. The tip was moved across the surface of a 100-square nanometer section of graphene, and spectroscopic data was acquired every 0.4 nanometers.

The measurements were done at 4.3 degrees Kelvin to take advantage of the fact that energy resolution is proportional to the temperature. The scanning-tunneling microscope, designed and built by Joseph Stroscio at NIST’s Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, used a superconducting magnet to provide the magnetic fields needed to study the orbits.

According to First, the study raises a number of questions for future research, including how the energy gaps will affect electron transport properties, how the observed effects may impact proposed bi-layer graphene coherent devices – and whether the new phenomenon can be controlled.

“This study is really a stepping stone in long path to understanding the subtleties of graphene’s interesting properties,” he said. “This material is different from anything we have worked with before in electronics.”

###

In addition to those already mentioned, the study also included Walt de Heer, Kevin D. Kubista, Ming Ruan, and Markus Kinderman from Georgia Tech and Gregory M. Rutter from NIST. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Semiconductor Research Corporation and the W.M. Keck Foundation. Additional assistance was provided by Georgia Tech’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC)

Graphene 2.0

Yep, I’m going to be lazy just cop part of the title of this release, well really more of an article than an out-and-out press release. Sounds like a pretty cool graphene transistor with potential real world applications.

The release:

Graphene 2.0: a new approach to making a unique material

June 30, 2010

Since its discovery, graphene—an unusual and versatile substance composed of a single-layer crystal lattice of carbon atoms—has caused much excitement in the scientific community. Now, Nongjian (NJ) Tao, a researcher at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University has hit on a new way of making graphene, maximizing the material’s enormous potential, particularly for use in high-speed electronic devices.

Along with collaborators from Germany’s Max Planck Institute, the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Utah, and Tsinghua University, Beijing, Tao created a graphene transistor composed of 13 benzene rings.

The molecule, known as a coronene, shows an improved electronic band gap, a property which may help to overcome one of the central obstacles to applying graphene technology for electronics. Tao is the director of the Biodesign Institute’s Center for Bioelectronics and Biosensors and electrical engineering professor in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. The group’s work appears in the June 29 advanced online issue of Nature Communications.

Eventually, graphene components may find their way into a broad array of products, from lasers to ultra-fast computer chips; ultracapacitors with unprecedented storage capabilities; tools for microbial detection and diagnosis; photovoltaic cells; quantum computing applications and many others.

As the name suggests, graphene is closely related to graphite. Each time a pencil is drawn across a page, tiny fragments of graphene are shed. When properly magnified, the substance resembles an atomic-scale chicken wire. Sheets of the material possess exceptional electronic and optical properties, making it highly attractive for varied applications.

“Graphene is an amazing material, made of carbon atoms connected in a honeycomb structure,” Tao says, pointing to graphene’s huge electrical mobility—the ease with which electrons can flow through the material. Such high mobility is a critical parameter in determining the speed of components like transistors.

Producing usable amounts of graphene however, can be tricky. Until now, two methods have been favored, one in which single layer graphene is peeled from a multilayer sheet of graphite, using adhesive tape and the other, in which crystals of graphene are grown on a substrate, such as silicon carbide.

In each case, an intrinsic property of graphene must be overcome for the material to be suitable for a transistor. As Tao explains, “a transistor is basically a switch—you turn it on or off. A graphene transistor is very fast but the on/off ratio is very tiny. ” This is due to the fact that the space between the valence and conduction bands of the material—or band gap as it is known—is zero for graphene.

In order to enlarge the band gap and improve the on/off ratio of the material, larger sheets of graphene may be cut down to nanoscale sizes. This has the effect of opening the gap between valence and conductance bands and improving the on/off ratio, though such size reduction comes at a cost. The process is laborious and tends to introduce irregularities in shape and impurities in chemical composition, which somewhat degrade the electrical properties of the graphene.  “This may not really be a viable solution for mass production,” Tao observes.

Rather than a top down approach in which sheets of graphene are reduced to a suitable size to act as transistors, Tao’s approach is bottom up—building up the graphene, molecular piece by piece. To do this, Tao relies on the chemical synthesis of benzene rings, hexagonal structures, each formed from 6 carbon atoms. “Benzene is usually an insulating material, ” Tao says. But as more such rings are joined together, the material’s behavior becomes more like a semiconductor.

Using this process, the group was able to synthesize a coronene molecule, consisting of 13 benzene rings arranged in a well defined shape. The molecule was then fitted on either side with linker groups—chemical binders that allow the molecule to be attached to electrodes, forming a nanoscale circuit. An electrical potential was then passed through the molecule and the behavior, observed. The new structure displayed transistor properties, showing reversible on and off switches.

Tao points out that the process of chemical synthesis permits the fine-tuning of structures in terms of ideal size, shape and geometric structure, making it advantageous for commercial mass production. Graphene can also be made free of defects and impurities, thereby reducing electrical scattering and providing material with maximum mobility and carrier velocity, ideal for high-speed electronics.

In conventional devices, resistance is proportional to temperature, but in the graphene transistors by Tao et al., electron mobility is due to quantum tunneling, and remains temperature independent—a signature of coherent process.

The group believes they will be able to enlarge the graphene structures through chemical synthesis to perhaps hundreds of rings, while still maintaining a sufficient band gap to enable switching behavior. The research opens many possibilities for the future commercialization of this uncommon material, and its use in a new generation of ultra high-speed electronics.

Written by Richard Harth
Biodesign Institute Science Writer

Friday video fun — graphene into fullerene

This time it’s fun with science watching graphene turn into buckyballs.

PhysOrg has an article covering this video with additional images.

From the link:

Peering through a transmission electron microscope (TEM), researchers from Germany, Spain, and the UK have observed graphene sheets transforming into spherical fullerenes, better known as buckyballs, for the first time. The experiment could shed light on the process of how fullerenes are formed, which has so far remained mysterious on the atomic scale.

“This is the first time that anyone has directly observed the mechanism of fullerene formation,” Andrei Khlobystov of the University of Nottingham toldPhysOrg.com. “Shortly after the discovery of fullerene (exactly 25 years ago), the ‘top down’ mechanism of fullerene assembly was proposed. However, it was soon rejected in favor of a multitude of different ‘bottom up’ mechanisms, mainly because people could not understand how a flake of graphene could form a fullerene and because they did not have means to observe the fullerene formation in situ.”

Nanoscale circuits on graphene

Via KurzweilAI.net — For all those fresh graduates out there, one word — graphene.

Simple way to create nanocircuitry on graphene developed

KurzweilAI.net, June 11, 2010 A method of drawing nanoscale circuits onto atom-thick sheets of graphene has been developed by researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Georgia Institute ofTechnology, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) The simple, quick one-step process for creating nanowires, based on thermochemical nanolithography (TCNL), tunes the electronic properties of reduced graphene oxide, allowing it to switch from being an insulating material to a conducting material. Scientists who work with nanocircuits are enthusiastic about graphene because electrons meet with less resistance when they travel along graphene compared to silicon and because today’s silicon transistors are nearly as small as allowed by the laws of physics. Graphene also has the edge due to its thickness – it’s a carbon sheet that is a single atom thick. However, no one knew how to produce graphene nanostructures with such a reproducible or scalable method until now. More info: Georgia Institute of Technology

Manufacturing graphene …

… just got a little bit easier. This is good news out of Rice University. I written this many times, but there’s simply too much smoke in the graphene hype for there not to be a serious fire somewhere. I’m guessing some combination of display technology for handheld electronics is one of the best areas to monitor for market-ready graphene applications.

From the link:

Single-atom-thick sheets of carbon called graphene have some amazing properties: graphene is strong, highly electrically conductive, flexible, and transparent. This makes it a promising material to make flexible touch screens and superstrong structural materials. But creating these thin carbon sheets, and then building things out of them, is difficult to do outside the lab.

Now an advance in making and processing graphene in solution may make it practical to work with the material at manufacturing scale. Researchers at Rice University have made graphene solutions 10 times more concentrated than any before. They’ve used these solutions to make transparent, conductive sheets similar to the electrodes on displays, and they’re currently developing methods for spinning the graphene solutions to generate fibers and structural materials for airplanes and other vehicles that promise to be less expensive than today’s carbon fiber.

Making material: Sheets of graphene lay atop a mat of single-walled carbon nanotubes.
Credit: N. Behabtu/Rice University

Graphene as quantum dots

Nanoelectronics is a major — and important — field right now, and graphene and its cousin graphane are very important materials research components. Both of the nanomaterials are getting a lot of  hype, particularly graphene, but there’s far too much smoke for there not to be at least a little fire. It’s exciting to keep watch on the news to see the breakthroughs as they happen, and eventually cover real-world, market-ready uses for graphene and graphane.

The release:

Graphane yields new potential

Rice physicists dig theoretical wells to mine quantum dots

Graphane is the material of choice for physicists on the cutting edge of materials science, and Rice University researchers are right there with the pack – and perhaps a little ahead.

Researchers mentored by Boris Yakobson, a Rice professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of chemistry, have discovered the strategic extraction of hydrogen atoms from a two-dimensional sheet of graphane naturally opens up spaces of pure graphene that look – and act – like quantum dots.

That opens up a new world of possibilities for an ever-shrinking class of nanoelectronics that depend on the highly controllable semiconducting properties of quantum dots, particularly in the realm of advanced optics.

The theoretical work by Abhishek Singh and Evgeni Penev, both postdoctoral researchers in co-author Yakobson’s group, was published online last week in the journal ACS Nano and will be on the cover of the print version in June. Rice was recently named the world’s No. 1 institution for materials science research by a United Kingdom publication.

Graphene has become the Flat Stanley of materials. The one-atom-thick, honeycomb-like form of carbon may be two-dimensional, but it seems to be everywhere, touted as a solution to stepping beyond the limits of Moore’s Law.

Graphane is simply graphene modified by hydrogen atoms added to both sides of the matrix, which makes it an insulator. While it’s still technically only a single atom thick, graphane offers great possibilities for the manipulation of the material’s semiconducting properties.

Quantum dots are crystalline molecules from a few to many atoms in size that interact with light and magnetic fields in unique ways. The size of a dot determines its band gap – the amount of energy needed to close the circuit – and makes it tunable to a precise degree. The frequencies of light and energy released by activated dots make them particularly useful for chemical sensors, solar cells, medical imaging and nanoscale circuitry.

Singh and Penev calculated that removing islands of hydrogen from both sides of a graphane matrix leaves a well with all the properties of quantum dots, which may also be useful in creating arrays of dots for many applications.

“We arrived at these ideas from an entirely different study of energy storage in a form of hydrogen adsorption on graphene,” Yakobson said. “Abhishek and Evgeni realized that this phase transformation (from graphene to graphane), accompanied by the change from metal to insulator, offers a novel palette for nanoengineering.”

Their work revealed several interesting characteristics. They found that when chunks of the hydrogen sublattice are removed, the area left behind is always hexagonal, with a sharp interface between the graphene and graphane. This is important, they said, because it means each dot is highly contained; calculations show very little leakage of charge into the graphane host material. (How, precisely, to remove hydrogen atoms from the lattice remains a question for materials scientists, who are working on it, they said.)

“You have an atom-like spectra embedded within a media, and then you can play with the band gap by changing the size of the dot,” Singh said. “You can essentially tune the optical properties.”

Along with optical applications, the dots may be useful in single-molecule sensing and could lead to very tiny transistors or semiconductor lasers, he said.

Challenges remain in figuring out how to make arrays of quantum dots in a sheet of graphane, but neither Singh nor Penev sees the obstacles as insurmountable.

“We think the major conclusions in the paper are enough to excite experimentalists,” said Singh, who will soon leave Rice to become an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. “Some are already working in the directions we explored.”

“Their work is actually supporting what we’re suggesting, that you can do this patterning in a controlled way,” Penev said.

When might their calculations bear commercial fruit? “That’s a tough question,” Singh said. “It won’t be that far, probably — but there are challenges. I don’t know that we can give it a time frame, but it could happen soon.”

###

Funding from the Office of Naval Research supported the work. Computations were performed at the Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Center at the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Graphene transistor

One step toward nanoelectronics.

From the link:

For years, scientists and researchers have been looking into the properties of carbon nanotubes and graphene for use in nanoelectronics. “There is no real mass application of devices based on graphene and carbon nanotubes,” Zhenxing Wang tells PhysOrg.com. “This is really an opportunity for them to show their capabilities.”

Wang is part of a group at the Key Laboratory for the Physics and Chemistry of Nanodevices at Peking University in Beijing. Along with Zhiyong Zhang, Huilong Xu, Li Ding, Sheng Wang, and Lian-Mao Peng, Wang tested a top-gate graphene field-effect transistor based frequency doubler in order to gauge its performance. They were able to show that a graphene based frequency doubler can provide more than 90% converting efficiency, while the corresponding value is not larger than 30% for conventional frequency doubler. Their work is published in Applied Physics Letters: “A high-performance top-gate graphene field-effect transistor based frequency doubler.”

Graphene as a heat sink

Nanotech news from UC Riverside.

The release:

Hot new material can keep electronics cool

Few atomic layers of graphene reveal unique thermal properties

		IMAGE: Alexander Balandin is a professor of electrical engineering in the Bourns College of Engineering at the University of California, Riverside. Click here for more information.

Professor Alexander Balandin and a team of UC Riverside researchers, including Chun Ning Lau, an associate professor of physics, have taken another step toward new technology that could keep laptops and other electronic devices from overheating.

Balandin, a professor of electrical engineering in the Bourns College of Engineering, experimentally showed in 2008 that graphene, a recently discovered single-atom-thick carbon crystal, is a strong heat conductor. The problem for practical applications was that it is difficult to produce large, high quality single atomic layers of the material.

Now, in a paper published in Nature Materials, Balandin and co-workers found that multiple layers of graphene, which are easier to make, retain the strong heat conducting properties.

That’s also a significant discovery in fundamental physics. Balandin’s group, in addition to measurements, explained theoretically how the materials’ ability to conduct heat evolves when one goes from conventional three-dimensional bulk materials to two-dimensional atomically-thin films, such as graphene.

The results published in Nature Materials may have important practical applications in removal of dissipated hear from electronic devices.

Heat is an unavoidable by-product when operating electronic devices. Electronic circuits contain many sources of heat, including millions of transistors and interconnecting wiring. In the past, bigger and bigger fans have been used to keep computer chips cool, which improved performance and extended their life span. However, as computers have become faster and gadgets have gotten smaller and more portable the big-fan solution no longer works.

New approaches to managing heat in electronics include incorporating materials with superior thermal properties, such as graphene, into silicon computer chips. In addition, proposed three-dimension electronics, which use vertical integration of computer chips, would depend on heat removal even more, Balandin said.

Silicon, the most common electronic material, has good electronic properties but not so good thermal properties, particularly when structured at the nanometer scale, Balandin said. As Balandin’s research shows, graphene has excellent thermal properties in addition to unique electronic characteristics.

“Graphene is one of the hottest materials right now,” said Balandin, who is also chair of the Material Sciences and Engineering program. “Everyone is talking about it.”

Graphene is not a replacement for silicon, but, instead could be used in conjunction with silicon, Balandin said. At this point, there is no reliable way to synthesize large quantities of graphene. However, progress is being made and it could be possible in a year or two, Balandin said.

Initially, graphene would likely be used in some niche applications such as thermal interface materials for chip packaging or transparent electrodes in photovoltaic solar cells, Balandin said. But, in five years, he said, it could be used with silicon in computer chips, for example as interconnect wiring or heat spreaders. It may also find applications in ultra-fast transistors for radio frequency communications. Low-noise graphene transistors have already been demonstrated in Balandin’s lab.

Balandin published the Nature Materials paper with two of his graduate students Suchismita Ghosh, who is now at Intel Corporation, and Samia Subrina, Lau. one of her graduate students, Wenzhong Bao, and Denis L. Nika and Evghenii P. Pokatilov, visting researchers in Balandin’s lab who are based at the State University of Moldova.

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The University of California, Riverside (www.ucr.edu) is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California’s diverse culture, UCR’s enrollment of over 19,000 is expected to grow to 21,000 students by 2020. The campus is planning a medical school and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Graduate Center. The campus has an annual statewide economic impact of more than $1 billion.

Cool nanotech image — atomic moire pattern of graphene

Check this out:

Caption: Moiré patterns appear when two or more periodic grids are overlaid slightly askew, which creates a new larger periodic pattern. Researchers from NIST and Georgia Tech imaged and interpreted the moiré patterns created by overlaid sheets of graphene to determine how the lattices of the individual sheets were stacked in relation to one another and to find subtle strains in the regions of bulges or wrinkles in the sheets.

Credit: NIST

Usage Restrictions: None

Related news release: Seeing moire in graphene

Is graphene pliable?

Looks like more so than carbon nanotubes. This attribute is key to using the material in electronic devices such as actuators, valves in labs-on-a-chip and electronic paper.

From the link:

Physicists at UC San Diego and Boston University think so. In a paper published in the journal Physical Review B, the scientists say the propensity of graphene—a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice— to stick to itself and form carbon “nanoscrolls” could be controlled electrostatically to form a myriad of new devices.

Unlike carbon nanotubes—cylindrical molecules of pure carbon with novel properties that have become the focus of much of the attention of new application in electronics and materials development—carbon nanoscrolls retain open edges and have no caps.

“As a result, nanoscrolls can change their shape and their inner and outer diameters, while nanotubes cannot,” said Michael Fogler, an associate professor of physics at UCSD and the first author of the paper.

Controlling the electronic properties of graphene

News from Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt on plasmonics in graphene.

The release:

Graphene: What projections and humps can be good for

Investigators from Hanover and Braunschweig measure how the electronic properties of graphene can be controlled with purposefully used roughnesses

This release is available in German.

		IMAGE: A residual interaction with the SiC substrate causes the formation of the six-fold satellite reflex structure. Click here for more information.

At present, graphene probably is the most investigated new material system worldwide. Due to its astonishing mechanical, chemical and electronic properties, it promises manifold future applications – for example in microelectronics. The electrons in graphene are particularly movable and could, therefore, replace silicon which is used today as the basic material of fast computer chips. In a research cooperation, scientists of Leibniz University Hanover and of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) have now investigated in which way a rough base affects the electronic properties of the graphene layer. Their results suggest that it will soon be possible to control plasmons, i.e. collective oscillations of electrons, purposefully in the graphene, by virtually establishing a lane composed of projections and humps for them. The results were published in the current edition of the New Journal of Physics.

The structure of graphene itself is fascinating: It consists of exactly one single, regular layer of carbon atoms. To manufacture this incredibly thin layer absolutely neatly is a great challenge. A possible method to recipitate graphene extensively on an insulating substrate is epitaxy, i.e. the controlled growth of graphene on insulating silicon carbide. For this purpose, a silicon carbide crystal is heated in vacuum. Starting from a specific temperature, carbon atoms migrate to the surface and form a monoatomic layer on the – still solid – silicon carbide. An important question for later applications is, how defects and steps of the silicon carbide surface affect the electronic properties of the graphene grown on it.

Within the scope of a research cooperation between PTB and Leibniz University Hanover, the influence of defects in the graphene on the electronic properties has been investigated. During the investigations, special attention was paid to the influence of the defects on a special electronic excitation, the so-called plasmons.

By different sample preparation, first of all silicon carbide crystals with different surface roughness and, thus, with a different concentration of surface defects were investigated, on which, subsequently, graphene formed. The influence of the defects on the plasmon excitations was then investigated by means of low-energy electron diffraction (SPA-LEED) and electron loss spectroscopy (EELS).

The process revealed a strong dependence of the lifetime of plasmon on the surface quality. Defects, as they are caused on step edges and grain boundaries, strongly impede the propagation of the plasmons and drastically shorten their lifetime. Here it is remarkable that the other electronic properties of the plasmons, in particular their dispersion, remain largely unaffected.

This opens up interesting possibilities for the future technical application and use of plasmons (the so-called “plasmonics”) in graphene. By selective adjustment of the surface roughness, different graphene ranges could be generated in which the plasmons are either strongly dampened or can propagate almost unobstructedly. In this way, the plasmons could be conducted along “plasmon conductors” with low surface roughness specifically from one point of a graphene chip to another.

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Original publication:
T. Langer, J. Baringhaus, H. Pfnür, H. W. Schumacher and C. Tegenkamp:
“Plasmon damping below the Landau regime: the role of defects in epitaxial graphene”.
New Journal of Physics 12, 033017 (2010).
http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/12/3/033017/

Graphene plus substrate still great thermal conductor

A graphene two-fer this evening. This news is another important finding toward commercializing graphene.

The release:

With support, graphene still a superior thermal conductor

Super-thin material advances toward next generation applications

		IMAGE: A one-atom thick sheet of graphene (highlighted in the circular window) on top of a silicon dioxide support proves to be an excellent thermal conductor, according to new research published… Click here for more information.

CHESTNUT HILL, MA (4/8/2010) – The single-atom thick material graphene maintains its high thermal conductivity when supported by a substrate, a critical step to advancing the material from a laboratory phenomenon to a useful component in a range of nano-electronic devices, researchers report in the April 9 issue of the journal Science.

The team of engineers and theoretical physicists from the University of Texas at Austin, Boston College, and France’s Commission for Atomic Energy report the super-thin sheet of carbon atoms – taken from the three-dimensional material graphite – can transfer heat more than twice as efficiently as copper thin films and more than 50 times better than thin films of silicon.

Since its discovery in 2004, graphene has been viewed as a promising new electronic material because it offers superior electron mobility, mechanical strength and thermal conductivity. These characteristics are crucial as electronic devices become smaller and smaller, presenting engineers with a fundamental problem of keeping the devices cool enough to operate efficiently.

The research advances the understanding of graphene as a promising candidate to draw heat away from “hot spots” that form in the tight knit spaces of devices built at the micro and nano scales. From a theoretical standpoint, the team also developed a new view of how heat flows in graphene.

When suspended, graphene has extremely high thermal conductivity of 3,000 to 5,000 watts per meter per Kelvin. But for practical applications, the chicken-wire like graphene lattice would be attached to a substrate. The team found supported graphene still has thermal conductivity as high as 600 watts per meter per Kelvin near room temperature. That far exceeds the thermal conductivities of copper, approximately 250 watts, and silicon, only 10 watts, thin films currently used in electronic devices.

		IMAGE: Boston College physicist David Broido worked with colleagues from the University of Texas at Austin and France’s Commission for Atomic Energy to determine why graphene maintains its superior thermal conductivity… Click here for more information.

The loss in heat transfer is the result of graphene’s interaction with the substrate, which interferes with the vibrational waves of graphene atoms as they bump against the adjacent substrate, according to co-author David Broido, a Boston College Professor of Physics.

The conclusion was drawn with the help of earlier theoretical models about heat transfer within suspended graphene, Broido said. Working with former BC graduate student Lucas Lindsay, now an instructor at Christopher Newport University, and Natalio Mingo of France’s Commission for Atomic Energy, Broido re-examined the theoretical model devised to explain the performance of suspended graphene.

“As theorists, we’re much more detached from the device or the engineering side. We’re more focused on the fundamentals that explain how energy flows through a sheet graphene. We took our existing model for suspended graphene and expanded the theoretical model to describe this interaction that takes place between graphene and the substrate and the influence on the movement of heat through the material and, ultimately, it’s thermal conductivity.”

In addition to its superior strength, electron mobility and thermal conductivity, graphene is compatible with thin film silicon transistor devices, a crucial characteristic if the material is to be used in low-cost, mass production. Graphene nano-electronic devices have the potential to consume less energy, run cooler and more reliably, and operate faster than the current generation of silicon and copper devices.

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Broido, Lindsay and Mingo were part of a research team led by Li Shi, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin, which also included his UT colleagues Jae Hun Seol, Insun Jo, Arden Moore, Zachary Aitken, Michael Petttes, Xueson Li, Zhen Yao, Rui Huang, and Rodney Ruoff.

The research was supported by the Thermal Transport Processes Program and the Mechanics of Materials Program of the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.

Direct chemical vapor deposition used to create graphene

This development from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is a major breakthrough toward commercializing graphene. The link goes to a news release on this development, but it also serves as a very nice quick-hit primer on graphene as a material.

The release:

Graphene Films Clear Major Fabrication Hurdle

APRIL 08, 2010

Lynn Yarris

Graphene, the two-dimensional crystalline form of carbon, is a potential superstar for the electronics industry. With freakishly mobile electrons that can blaze through the material at nearly the speed of light – 100 times faster than electrons can move through silicon – graphene could be used to make superfast transistors or computer memory chips. Graphene’s unique “chicken wire” atomic structure exhibits incredible flexibility and mechanical strength, as well as unusual optical properties that could open a number of promising doors in both the electronics and the photonics industries. However, among the hurdles preventing graphite from joining the pantheon of star high-tech materials, perhaps none looms larger than just learning to make the stuff in high quality and usable quantities.

“Before we can fully utilize the superior electronic properties of graphene in devices, we must first develop a method of forming uniform single-layer graphene films on nonconducting substrates on a large scale,” says Yuegang Zhang, a materials scientist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Current fabrication methods based on mechanical cleavage or ultrahigh vacuum annealing, he says, are ill-suited for commercial-scale production. Graphene films made via solution-based deposition and chemical reduction have suffered from poor or uneven quality.

Zhang and colleagues at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) center for nanoscience, have taken a significant step at clearing this major hurdle. They have successfully used direct chemical vapor deposition (CVD) to synthesize single-layer films of graphene on a dielectric substrate. Zhang and his colleagues made their graphene films by catalytically decomposing hydrocarbon precursors over thin films of copper that had been pre-deposited on the dielectric substrate. The copper films subsequently dewetted (separated into puddles or droplets) and were evaporated. The final product was a single-layer graphene film on a bare dielectric.

“This is exciting news for electronic applications because chemical vapor deposition is a technique already widely used in the semiconductor industry,” Zhang says.

“Also, we can learn more about the growth of graphene on metal catalyst surfaces by observing the evolution of the films after the evaporation of the copper. This should lay an important foundation for further control of the process and enable us to tailor the properties of these films or produce desired morphologies, such as graphene nanoribbons.”

Zhang and his colleagues have reported their findings in the journal Nano Letters in a paper titled, “Direct Chemical Vapor Deposition of Graphene on Dielectric Surfaces.” Other co-authors of this paper were Ariel Ismach, Clara Druzgalski, Samuel Penwell, Maxwell Zheng, Ali Javey and Jeffrey Bokor, all with Berkeley Lab.

In their study, Zhang and his colleagues used electron-beam evaporation to deposit copper films ranging in thickness from 100 to 450 nanometers. Copper was chosen because as a low carbon solubility metal catalyst it was expected to allow better control over the number of graphene layers produced. Several different dielectric substrates were evaluated including single-crystal quartz, sapphire, fused silica and silicon oxide wafers. CVD of the graphene was carried out at 1,000 degrees Celsius in durations that ranged from 15 minutes up to seven hours.

“This was done to allow us to study the effect of film thickness, substrate type and CVD growth time on the graphene formation,” Zhang says.

A combination of scanning Raman mapping and spectroscopy, plus scanning electron and atomic force microscopy confirmed the presence of continuous single-layer graphene films coating metal-free areas of dielectric substrate measuring tens of square micrometers.

“Further improvement on the control of the dewetting and evaporation process could lead  to the direct deposition of patterned graphene for large-scale electronic device fabrication, Zhang says. “This method could also be generalized and used to deposit other two-dimensional materials, such as boron-nitride.”

Even the appearance of wrinkles in the graphene films that followed along the lines of the dewetting shape of the copper could prove to be beneficial in the long-run. Although previous studies have indicated that wrinkles in a graphene film have a negative impact on electronic properties by introducing strains that reduce electron mobility, Zhang believes the wrinkles can be turned to an advantage.

“If we can learn to control the formation of wrinkles in our films, we should be able to modulate the resulting strain and thereby tailor electronic properties,” he says.

“Further study of the wrinkle formation could also give us important new clues for the formation of graphene nanoribbons.”

This work was primarily supported by the DOE Office of Science.

The Molecular Foundry is one of the five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers (NSRCs), premier national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale.  Together the NSRCs comprise a suite of complementary facilities that provide researchers with state-of-the-art capabilities to fabricate, process, characterize and model nanoscale materials, and constitute the largest infrastructure investment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative.  The NSRCs are located at DOE’s Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge and Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories.

Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California. Visit our website at www.lbl.gov.

Additional Information

A copy of the Nano Letters paper “Direct Chemical Vapor Deposition of Graphene on Dielectric Surfaces” can be viewed here: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl9037714

For more about Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry visit http://foundry.lbl.gov/

For more about the DOE NSRCs visit http://nano.energy.gov

(a) Optical image of a CVD graphene film on a copper layer showing the finger morphology of the metal; (b) Raman 2D band map of the graphene film between the copper fingers over the area marked by the red square on left. (image from Yuegang Zhang)

To make a graphene thin film, Berkeley researchers (a) evaporated a thin layer of copper on a dielectric surface; (b) then used CVD to lay down a graphene film over the copper. (c) The copper dewets and evaporates leaving (d) the graphene film directly on the dielectric substrate.

Growing and testing graphene

Doing some science on the once and future miracle material. I’m not holding my breath, but if graphene manages to reach fifty percent of its hype, it’s going to change the world. It’s that hyped, and it truly has that much promise.

From the link:

“We found that if a single graphene sheet is grown on a metal like ruthenium, the metal binds very strongly to the carbon atoms and disrupts the characteristic properties normally found in isolated graphene,” Sutter said. “But those properties re-emerge in subsequent layers grown on the substrate.”

In other words, the first graphene layer grown on ruthenium satiates the metal substrate, allowing the rest of the layers to reclaim their normal properties.

“As a result of this growth process, a two-layer stack acts like an isolated monolayer of graphene and a three-layer stack acts like an isolated bilayer,” Sutter said.

The findings of the group, which also includes Brookhaven researchers Mark Hybertsen, Jurek Sadowski, and Eli Sutter, lays groundwork for future graphene production for advanced technologies, and helps researchers understand how metals — for example in device contacts — change the properties of graphene.

Graphene may be key to storing hydrogen

Needless to say this will have a major impact on using hydrogen as a power source in fuel cells or other applications.

The release:

Layered graphene sheets could solve hydrogen storage issues

		IMAGE: A graphene-oxide framework (GOF) is formed of layers of graphene connected by boron-carboxylic “pillars.” GOFs such as this one are just beginning to be explored as a potential storage medium… Click here for more information.

Graphene—carbon formed into sheets a single atom thick—now appears to be a promising base material for capturing hydrogen, according to recent research* at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Pennsylvania. The findings suggest stacks of graphene layers could potentially store hydrogen safely for use in fuel cells and other applications.

Graphene has become something of a celebrity material in recent years due to its conductive, thermal and optical properties, which could make it useful in a range of sensors and semiconductor devices. The material does not store hydrogen well in its original form, according to a team of scientists studying it at the NIST Center for Neutron Research. But if oxidized graphene sheets are stacked atop one another like the decks of a multilevel parking lot, connected by molecules that both link the layers to one another and maintain space between them, the resulting graphene-oxide framework (GOF) can accumulate hydrogen in greater quantities.

Inspired to create GOFs by the metal-organic frameworks that are also under scrutiny for hydrogen storage, the team is just beginning to uncover the new structures’ properties. “No one else has ever made GOFs, to the best of our knowledge,” says NIST theorist Taner Yildirim. “What we have found so far, though, indicates GOFs can hold at least a hundred times more hydrogen molecules than ordinary graphene oxide does. The easy synthesis, low cost and non-toxicity of graphene make this material a promising candidate for gas storage applications.”

The GOFs can retain 1 percent of their weight in hydrogen at a temperature of 77 degrees Kelvin and ordinary atmospheric pressure—roughly comparable to the 1.2 percent that some well-studied metal-organic frameworks can hold, Yildirim says.

Another of the team’s potentially useful discoveries is the unusual relationship that GOFs exhibit between temperature and hydrogen absorption. In most storage materials, the lower the temperature, the more hydrogen uptake normally occurs. However, the team discovered that GOFs behave quite differently. Although a GOF can absorb hydrogen, it does not take in significant amounts at below 50 Kelvin (-223 degrees Celsius). Moreover, it does not release any hydrogen below this “blocking temperature”—suggesting that, with further research, GOFs might be used both to store hydrogen and to release it when it is needed, a fundamental requirement in fuel cell applications.

Some of the GOFs’ capabilities are due to the linking molecules themselves. The molecules the team used are all benzene-boronic acids that interact strongly with hydrogen in their own right. But by keeping several angstroms of space between the graphene layers—akin to the way pillars hold up a ceiling—they also increase the available surface area of each layer, giving it more spots for the hydrogen to latch on.

According to the team, GOFs will likely perform even better once the team explores their parameters in more detail. “We are going to try to optimize the performance of the GOFs and explore other linking molecules as well,” says Jacob Burress, also of NIST. “We want to explore the unusual temperature dependence of absorption kinetics, as well as whether they might be useful for capturing greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and toxins like ammonia.”

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The research is funded in part by the Department of Energy.

* J. Burress, J. Simmons, J. Ford and T.Yildirim. “Gas adsorption properties of graphene-oxide-frameworks and nanoporous benzene-boronic acid polymers.” To be presented at the March meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) in Portland, Ore., March 18, 2010. An abstract is available at http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR10/Event/122133

Mass producing graphene cheaply

Commercial production of graphene is coming and we can expect to see some of those “miracle material” claims begin to show fruition.

The release:

A huge step toward mass production of coveted form of carbon

		IMAGE: This graphic represents an atom-thin sheet of graphene, a form of carbon that could replace silicon in future electronic devices. Scientists have developed a simple manufacturing method that could allow… Click here for more information.

Scientists have leaped over a major hurdle in efforts to begin commercial production of a form of carbon that could rival silicon in its potential for revolutionizing electronics devices ranging from supercomputers to cell phones. Called graphene, the material consists of a layer of graphite 50,000 times thinner than a human hair with unique electronic properties. Their study appears in ACS’ Nano Letters, a monthly journal.

Victor Aristov and colleagues indicate that graphene has the potential to replace silicon in high-speed computer processors and other devices. Standing in the way, however, are today’s cumbersome, expensive production methods, which result in poor-quality graphene and are not practical for industrial scale applications.

Aristov and colleagues report that they have developed “a very simple procedure for making graphene on the cheap.” They describe growing high-quality graphene on the surface of commercially available silicon carbide wafers to produce material with excellent electronic properties. It “represents a huge step toward technological application of this material as the synthesis is compatible with industrial mass production,” their

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ARTICLE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE “Graphene Synthesis on Cubic SiC/Si Wafers. Perspectives for Mass Production of Graphene-Based Electronic Devices”

DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT ARTICLE http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/nl904115h

Conductive graphene ink

Looking for a market-ready application for graphene? Well, look no further …

From the second link:

This conductive ink is one of the first products on the market to incorporate graphene, a sheet of carbon just one atom thick. Applying the ink with standard techniques can print wiring for RFID antennas, keypads, and display backplanes directly onto paper or cardboard stock. Unlike metallic conductive inks, the graphene ink does not have to be heated after printing.

Courtesy of Vorbeck Materials

Graphene nanomesh may be the semiconductor solution

I’ve done tons of blogging on graphene and this news seems to be direct competition with this graphene news I covered about a week ago. The issue is turning graphene into a semiconductor to allow the material to eventually replace silicon in electronic devices. The last link up there goes to a post outlining the concept of using nanoribbons of graphene, the middle link goes to research claiming a “nanomesh” is a superior method of turning the carbon nanomaterial into a semiconductor.

The release:

New graphene ‘nanomesh’ could change the future of electronics

Graphene, a one-atom-thick layer of a carbon lattice with a honeycomb structure, has great potential for use in radios, computers, phones and other electronic devices. But applications have been stymied because the semi-metallic graphene, which has a zero band gap, does not function effectively as a semiconductor to amplify or switch electronic signals.

While cutting graphene sheets into nanoscale ribbons can open up a larger band gap and improve function, ‘nanoribbon’ devices often have limited driving currents, and practical devices would require the production of dense arrays of ordered nanoribbons — a process that so far has not been achieved or clearly conceptualized.

But Yu Huang, a professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, and her research team, in collaboration with UCLA chemistry professor Xiangfeng Duan, may have found a new solution to the challenges of graphene.

In research to be published in the March issue of Nature Nanotechnology (currently available online), Huang’s team reveals the creation of a new graphene nanostructure called graphene nanomesh, or GNM. The new structure is able to open up a band gap in a large sheet of graphene to create a highly uniform, continuous semiconducting thin film that may be processed using standard planar semiconductor processing methods.

“The nanomeshes are prepared by punching a high-density array of nanoscale holes into a single or a few layers of graphene using a self-assembled block copolymer thin film as the mask template,” said Huang.

The nanomesh can have variable periodicities, defined as the distance between the centers of two neighboring nanoholes. Neck widths, the shortest distance between the edges of two neighboring holes, can be as low as 5 nanometers.

This ability to control nanomesh periodicity and neck width is very important for controlling electronic properties because charge transport properties are highly dependent on the width and the number of critical current pathways.

Using such nanomesh as the semiconducting channel, Huang and her team have demonstrated room-temperature transistors that can support currents nearly 100 times greater than individual graphene nanoribbon devices, but with a comparable on-off ratio. The on-off ratio is the ratio between the currents when a device is switched on or switched off. This usually reveals how effectively a transistor can be switched off and on.

The researchers have also shown that the on-off ratio can be tuned by varying the neck width.

“GNMs can address many of the critical challenges facing graphene, as well as bypass the most challenging assembly problems,” Huang said. “In conjunction with recent advances in the growth of graphene over a large-area substrate, this concept has the potential to enable a uniform, continuous semiconducting nanomesh thin film that can be used to fabricate integrated devices and circuits with desired device size and driving current.

“The concept of the GNM therefore points to a clear pathway towards practical application of graphene as a semiconductor material for future electronics. The unique structural and electronic characteristics of the GNMs may also open up exciting opportunities in highly sensitive biosensors and a new generation of spintronics, from magnetic sensing to storage,” she said.

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The study was funded in part by Huang’s UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science Fellowship.

The UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, established in 1945, offers 28 academic and professional degree programs, including an interdepartmental graduate degree program in biomedical engineering. Ranked among the top 10 engineering schools at public universities nationwide, the school is home to seven multimillion-dollar interdisciplinary research centers in wireless sensor systems, nanotechnology, nanomanufacturing and nanoelectronics, all funded by federal and private agencies.

For more news, visit the UCLA Newsroom and follow us on Twitter.

Graphene replacing silicon — is it “when” and not “if?”

Not quite yet, but headway is being made in making graphene the successor to silicon as the semiconductor for electronics. I first blogged about graphene replacing silicon back in late March 2008 (this blog wasn’t even three months old at the time — hit the link and dig the crazy layout I was using for KurzweilAI posts).

From the first link, the latest news — both good and bad — in making graphene the semiconductor of choice:

“Graphene has been the subject of intense focus and research for a few years now,” Philip Kim tells PhysOrg.com. “There are researchers that feel that it is possible that graphene could replace silicon as a semiconductor in electronics.”

Kim is a scientist at Columbia University in New York City. He has been working with Melinda Han and Juliana Brant to try and come up with a way to make graphene a feasible replacement for silicon. Toward that end, they have been looking at ways to overcome some of the problems associated with using graphene as a semiconductor in electronic devices. They set forth some ideas for electron transport for graphene in Physical Review Letters: “Electron Transport in Disordered Graphene Nanoribbons.”

“Graphene has high mobility, and less scattering than silicon. Theoretically, it is possible to make smaller structures that are more stable at the nanolevel than those made from silicon,” Kim says. He points out that as electronics continue to shrink in size, the interest in finding viable alternatives to silicon is likely to increase. Graphene is a good candidate because of the high electron mobility it offers, its stability on such a small scale, and the possibility that one could come up with different device concepts for electronics.

And here’s a bonus fun graphene graphic from the link:

Graphene is an atomic-scale honeycomb lattice made of carbon atoms. By Dr. Thomas Szkopek, via Wikipedia

Graphene transistors are really fast

Fast like already an order of magnitude faster than the quickest silicon transistors. The IBM prototype graphene transistors run at 100 gigahertz.

From the link:

The transistors were created using processes that are compatible with existing semiconductor manufacturing, and experts say they could be scaled up to produce transistors for high-performance imaging, radar, and communications devices within the next few years, and for zippy computer processors in a decade or so.

Researchers have previously made graphene transistors using laborious mechanical methods, for example by flaking off sheets of graphene from graphite; the fastest transistors made this way have reached speeds of up to 26 gigahertz. Transistors made using similar methods have not equaled these speeds.

Growing transistors on a wafer not only leads to better performance, it’s also more commercially feasible, says Phaedon Avouris, leader of the nanoscale science and technology group at the IBM Watson Research Center in Ossining, NY where the work was carried out.

Speedy switches: These arrays of transistors, printed on a silicon carbide wafer, operate at speeds of 100 gigahertz.

Credit: Science/AAAS

Growing graphene

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about graphene so I was pleased to read this news at the physics arXiv blog on a method to produce the material at a substantially lower cost. The hype about graphene probably is a bit over-the-top, but it’s proving to be quite the miracle nanomaterial.

From the second link:

The world of materials science is aflutter with stories about graphene, a supermaterial that is capable of almost anything (if you believe the hype). This form of carbon chickenwire, they tell us, is stronger, faster and better than almost any other material you care to name.

But not cheaper. At least not yet. The big problem with graphene is making it. The only way to get it is to chip away at a bigger block of graphite and then hunt through the flakes looking for single layers of the stuff. That’s not a technique that’s going to revolutionise the electronics industry, regardless of how much cheap labour is available in China.

That’s why an announcement from Hirokazu Fukidome at Tohoku University in Japan and a few buddies is hugely important. These guys say they have found a way to grow graphene on a silicon substrate. To show off their technique they’ve combined it with conventional lithography to create a graphene-on-silicon field effect transistor–just the kind of device the electronics industry wants to build by the billion.

That’s a big deal for two reasons. First, being able to grow graphene from scratch is going to be a huge boost to the study of this stuff and its myriad amazing properties. Second, being able to grow it on silicon makes it compatible (in principle at least) with the vast silicon-based fabrication industry as it stands.