Graphene: one atom thick material with exciting potential!

If you take Graphene, and then insert holes in a specific size and distribution, then it should be possible to impart the material particular electronic characteristics. This is why there is an intensive research to synthesize and characterize graphene-like polymers.

Now scientists have successfully created a graphene-like polymer. To achieve this feat the researchers allowed chemical building blocks of functionalized phenyl rings to “grow” spontaneously into a two-dimensional structure on a silver substrate. This created a porous form of graphene with pore diameters of a single atom and pore-to-pore spacings of less than a nanometer.

Rice University and Houston-based M-I SWACO, the world's largest producer of drilling fluids for the petrochemical industry, have signed an agreement for research funds to develop a graphene additive that will improve the productivity of wells.

The company will spend $450,000 over two years for research by the lab of James Tour, Rice's Chao Professor of Chemistry and professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science.

Via NanoWerk

Scientists from the HRL Laboratories (in California) announced recently they have fabricated and demonstrated graphene-on-silicon field effect transistors (FETs) at full wafer scale—a revolutionary advancement in electronics that will enable unprecedented capabilities in high-bandwidth communications, imaging and radar systems.

The work is part of the Carbon Electronics for RF Applications, or CERA program, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and under the management of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center. HRL has been collaborating with a group of universities, commercial companies and the Naval Research Laboratory on the program.

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero has won the 2009 David and Lucile Packard fellowship. He was granted 875k$ (a five-year grant). Pablo will use this to study unique features of Graphene and also to study topological insulators.

Via AZoNano

A team of scientists from the Grenoble High Magnetic Field Laboratory in France, has published a new study called "How perfect can Graphene be?" - in which they report how they found that their naturally occurring graphene sample possessed a carrier mobility almost two orders of magnitude higher than other types of graphene, and a scattering time that significantly exceeds those reported in any man-made graphene samples. Both properties could open the doors for future developments in graphene technologies.

IBM researchers are using graphene sheets to make photo(light) detectors. Graphene transports electrons very quickly, tens of times faster than current photo detectors (made by materials called III-V semiconductors), and can also absorb more light frequencies (visible and infrared).

It is already known that when metal contacts are deposited on graphene, electric fields are generated at the interface between the two materials. So the researchers took advantage of this field. Their device is a piece of multilayered graphene with metal contacts on top. When they shine light near the contact, the field separates the electrons and holes, and a current is generated.

A single-sheet of Graphene can absorb 2.3% of the light falling on it, which is a lot for a one-atom-thick material. 

An ultra-fast photodetector could be used to make next-gen optical communication networks ( with rates over 40-gigabits per second), optical computers, medical equipment, and more. 

Via Technology Review

Researchers at MIT have designed new hierarchical assemblies of graphene nanoribbons through hydrogen bonds, inspired by biological structures found in nature such as proteins and DNA macromolecules. Their work brings about a synergistic viewpoint that combines advances in materials development and insight gained from biological structures, and leads to new understanding of the mechanics and physics hydrogen bonds at the bio-nano interface.

Buehler, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor at MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, together with his postdoctoral associate Zhiping Xu, have investigated the mechanical and electronic properties of graphene nanoribbons through first principles calculations. They demonstrate that hierarchical graphene nanoribbons not only preserve the unique electronic properties of individual graphene nanoribbons in the bulk, but are also energetically and mechanically stable.