TimmyHThe Year in Materials
January 6th 2009 22:16
Stretchable electronics and the strongest material ever were just two achievements of 2008.
Graphene, the material behind one of our 10 emerging technologies of 2008, stayed in the news all year. In July, researchers who poked the single-atom-thick carbon sheets with the tip of an atomic force microscope confirmed that graphene is the strongest material ever tested. But most of the graphene community, including Kostya Novoselov, one of the first to make graphene and one of TR's top 35 innovators under 35 in 2008, is interested in graphene's electrical properties. Last month, two separate groups of researchers reported that they had made fast graphene transistors that could be used for wireless communications. Other researchers addressed the problem of manufacturing graphene. Novoselov and his collaborators originally made the single-atom-thick hydrocarbon sheets by crushing graphite between two layers of tape. But more scalable graphene-manufacturing technologies will be needed for the material to be adopted by the chip industry. One group at the University of California, Los Angeles, developed a simple method for making large sheets of graphene by dissolving graphite in hydrazine.
By Katherine Bourzac
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World’s strongest material: Researchers who probed single-atom-thick graphene with a sharp diamond tip found that it’s the strongest material ever tested. The illustration shows the atomic structure of graphene, a mesh of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Credit: Jeffrey Kysar, Columbia University
By Katherine Bourzac
READ MORE HERE
Really Long Link
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