Why is Ruoff, founder of company in Austin called Graphene Energy, have scientists abuzz?”
Imagine a carbon sheet that’s only one atom thick but is stronger than diamond and conducts electricity 100 times faster than the silicon in computer chips. That’s graphene, the latest wonder material coming out of science laboratories around the world. It’s creating tremendous buzz among physicists, chemists and electronic engineers. “It is the thinnest known material in the universe, and the strongest ever measured,” Andre Geim , a physicist at the University of Manchester, England , wrote in the June 19 issue of the journal Science. “A few grams could cover a football field,” said Rod Ruoff , a graphene researcher at the University of Texas, Austin , in an e-mail. A gram is about 1/30th of an ounce. Like diamond, graphene is pure carbon. It forms a six-sided mesh of atoms that, through an electron microscope, looks like a honeycomb or piece of chicken wire. Despite its strength, it’s as flexible as plastic wrap and can be bent, folded or rolled up like a scroll. Graphite, the lead i
Imagine a carbon sheet that’s only one atom thick but is stronger than diamond and conducts electricity 100 times faster than the silicon in computer chips. That’s graphene, the latest wonder material coming out of science laboratories around the world. It’s creating tremendous buzz among physicists, chemists and electronic engineers. “It is the thinnest known material in the universe, and the strongest ever measured,” Andre Geim , a physicist at the University of Manchester, England , wrote in the June 19 issue of the journal Science. “A few grams could cover a football field,” said Rod Ruoff , a graphene researcher at the University of Texas, Austin , in an e-mail. A gram is about 1/30th of an ounce. Like diamond, graphene is pure carbon. It forms a six-sided mesh of atoms that, through an electron microscope, looks like a honeycomb or piece of chicken wire. Despite its strength, it’s as flexible as plastic wrap and can be bent, folded or rolled up like a scroll. Graphite, the lead i
Ruoff founded a company in Austin called Graphene Energy, which is seeking ways to store renewable energy from solar cells or the energy captured from braking in autos. The Pentagon is also interested in this new high-tech material. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is spending $22 million on research to make computer chips and transistors out of graphene. Graphene was the leading topic at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society — a leading organization of physicists — in Pittsburgh in April. Researchers packed 23 panel sessions on the topic. About 1,500 scientific papers on graphene were published in 2008 alone. Until last year, the only way to make graphene was to mount flakes of graphite on sticky tape and separate a single layer by carefully peeling away the tape.
