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Graphene Able to Transport Huge Currents On the Nano Scale

posted by cmn32480 on Friday December 23 2016, @05:26AM   Printer-friendly
from the is-there-anything-this-stuff-can't-do? dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

New experiments have shown that it is possible for extremely high currents to pass through graphene, a form of carbon. This allows imbalances in electric charge to be rapidly rectified.

Once again, graphene has proven itself to be a rather special material: an international research team led by Professor Fritz Aumayr from the Institute of Applied Physics at TU Wien was able to demonstrate that the electrons in graphene are extremely mobile and react very quickly. Impacting xenon ions with a particularly high electric charge on a graphene film causes a large number of electrons to be torn away from the graphene in a very precise spot. However, the material was able to replace the electrons within some femtoseconds. This resulted in extremely high currents, which would not be maintained under normal circumstances. Its extraordinary electronic properties make graphene a very promising candidate for future applications in the field of electronics.

I love that we've arrived in an age where it's possible to measure femtoseconds.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 23 2016, @05:38AM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Friday December 23 2016, @05:38AM (#444949) Journal

    The article promises "ultra-fast electronics", though not computing specifically. Is this problem [wikipedia.org] still around?

    Graphene does not have an energy band-gap, which presents a hurdle for its applications in digital logic gates. The efforts to induce a band-gap in graphene via quantum confinement or surface functionalization have not resulted in a breakthrough. The negative differential resistance experimentally observed in graphene field-effect transistors of conventional design allows for construction of viable non-Boolean computational architectures with the gap-less graphene. The negative differential resistance — observed under certain biasing schemes — is an intrinsic property of graphene resulting from its symmetric band structure. The results present a conceptual change in graphene research and indicate an alternative route for graphene's applications in information processing.

    I love that we've arrived in an age where it's possible to measure femtoseconds.

    Femto- is a wasteland. Atto- or bust [hplusmagazine.com].

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