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Study unlocks full potential of 'supermaterial' graphene
New research reveals why the "supermaterial" graphene has not transformed electronics as promised, and shows how to double its performance and finally harness its extraordinary potential.
Graphene is the strongest material ever tested. It's also flexible, transparent and conducts heat and electricity 10 times better than copper.
After graphene research won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 it was hailed as a transformative material for flexible electronics, more powerful computer chips and solar panels, water filters and bio-sensors. But performance has been mixed and industry adoption slow.
Now a study published in Nature Communications identifies silicon contamination as the root cause of disappointing results and details how to produce higher performing, pure graphene.
The RMIT University team led by Dr Dorna Esrafilzadeh and Dr Rouhollah Ali Jalili inspected commercially-available graphene samples, atom by atom, with a state-of-art scanning transition electron microscope.
"We found high levels of silicon contamination in commercially available graphene, with massive impacts on the material's performance," Esrafilzadeh said.
[...] The article "Silicon as a ubiquitous contaminant in graphene derivatives with significant impact on device performance" is published in Nature Communications: DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07396-3
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 03 2018, @03:30AM
A little excessive in your estimated resource requirements. But, yes, in 300 baud days, it would probably have taken a bunch of ECL chips to process 28Kpps because FET wasn't fast enough yet. It would be a little silly for you to pay far more for your modem than for your computer, not to mention how would ISPs cool racks with hundreds of those monsters. So it may have been technologically feasible, but not economically viable at that time.