Graphene-Info: the graphene experts

Researchers at Peking University, led by Liu Kaihui, together with Suzhou Laboratory, ShanghaiTech University, Wuhan University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Physics, have developed a way to grow rhombohedral-stacked graphene with high purity and at sizes far beyond what was previously achievable, addressing a longstanding obstacle to using the material in quantum computing hardware.

Most graphite and graphene research has focused on conventional AB-stacked layers, in which each layer sits in a staggered, alternating pattern relative to the one below. Rhombohedral, or ABC-stacked, graphene instead shifts every layer in the same direction, with each three-layer sequence repeating - a subtle structural difference that gives rise to superconductivity and the quantum anomalous Hall effect, making it an attractive platform for topological qubits that are inherently resistant to noise. The catch is that rhombohedral stacking is thermodynamically unstable and rare in nature: in the lab, ABC-stacked graphene tends to spontaneously revert to the far more common AB form, and until now the only way to obtain usable flakes was to mechanically exfoliate graphite and search under a microscope for the small fraction - under 1% of samples - that happened to have the right stacking.

Solidion Technology (Nasdaq: STI), the advanced battery developer that emerged from the 2024 merger of Global Graphene Group's Honeycomb Battery Technology with Nubia Brand International, has reported its Q2 2026 results, showing a substantially rebuilt balance sheet and a second straight quarter of revenue.

The company closed the quarter with $27.7 million in cash and cash equivalents, against $0.2 million at the end of 2025. Following the completion of its $35 million private placement in June, Solidion said the substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern, previously disclosed, has been alleviated. The company also restructured its August 2024 equity financing, eliminating all Series C and D pre-funded warrants along with the associated derivative liability - a move it says reduces future dilution risk. Long-term investors Madison Bond LLC and Bayside Project LLC converted their entire warrant allocation into common stock and agreed to lock-up restrictions on those shares.

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London, led by Prof. James Busfield, have developed transparent electrodes made of reduced graphene oxide (rGO) for dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs), enabling a new compact, electrically tunable soft lens. The work addresses a long-standing design constraint in electrostatically actuated lenses, where opaque compliant electrodes have to be placed around the lens periphery rather than on the optical path itself.

A photo of the fabricated DEA actuator (the rGO-coated membrane with circular electrodes). Image from: Advanced Functional Materials

DEAs are soft electromechanical transducers that behave like artificial muscles: a dielectric elastomer membrane sandwiched between compliant electrodes contracts in thickness and expands laterally when an electric field is applied. They're being explored for tunable lenses, adaptive filters, camouflage skins and other electrically reconfigurable optical devices. Most implementations, however, rely on non-transparent electrodes, forcing a separate actuation ring around the lens body and increasing the device's footprint. Transparent compliant electrodes remove that constraint by letting the electrode sit directly on the optical axis.

Researchers at Sweden's Uppsala University, working with beamline scientists at Synchrotron SOLEIL in France, have directly visualized how ultrathin metal-oxide layers reshape the electric field inside operating graphene devices, a capability previously accessible only indirectly through electrical transport measurements.

Metal-oxide layers such as aluminum oxide and titanium oxide are routinely deposited on graphene to deliberately alter its electron flow, giving device designers greater control in components ranging from transistors to spin valves. Until now, understanding of how these coatings act inside a working device has relied on theoretical models, simulations and indirect electrical measurements rather than direct observation. The team used X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy to map electrical potentials across graphene devices while they were biased and operating, tracking the valence-band onset under simultaneous source-drain and gate voltage to reconstruct the in-plane field profile.

MIT researchers, together with collaborators from Harvard University, Rice University, Yale University, MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Pohang University in South Korea, have developed a technique that uses graphene to grow air-stable, wafer-scale monolayer superconductors, addressing a longstanding barrier to using these ultrathin materials in practical quantum computing hardware.

The superconducting material (yellow/blue) grows in the tiny gap beneath a graphene layer (grey) placed atop a silicon dioxide substrate (purple). The graphene shields it from oxidation while guiding it into a smooth, uniform film over a large area. image credit: MIT

Two-dimensional superconductors are attractive for quantum circuits because their compact size and high crystallinity could enable far smaller quantum devices. However, they degrade almost immediately when exposed to air. Niobium diselenide (NbSe₂), a monolayer superconductor with especially high kinetic inductance - a property that lets it store large amounts of inductive energy in a very small area - has been particularly difficult to work with at scale: researchers have had to rely on small flakes produced by exfoliation, since large-area growth attempts oxidize and degrade before they can be protected.

Premier Graphene, a US-based advanced materials company focused on graphene production and formulation, has announced that its affiliate HGI Industrial Technologies has formed a joint venture with Canada's Nova Graphene to develop and commercialize graphene-enabled ballistic protection products for the North American market.

Under the agreement, HGI contributes its proprietary graphene production intellectual property and manufacturing capabilities, while Nova Graphene brings its graphene materials expertise and experience developing ballistic protection technologies, including five active research contracts with Defense Research & Development Canada (DRDC), among them a $1 million Phase II project on 3D-printed body armor. The joint venture will initially target advanced personal ballistic protection systems, including Level IIIA+ and Level IV hard plates, alongside vehicle, marine and architectural ballistic protection products.

An international team led by researchers at KU Leuven, with contributing authors from the University of Bath, Nanjing University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Monash University, has developed a graphene oxide membrane that speeds up the removal of water from isopropanol (IPA), a solvent used worldwide in the pharmaceutical and electronics industries. The results offer an alternative to conventional distillation-based purification, which requires high energy input.

Structural design of N-GOm: GO (gray) and NPGO (blue) nanosheets on a nylon substrate (yellow), forming sp2 graphitic and hydrophilic sp3 domains that create the membrane's cavity structure. Image credit: Nature Communications

Separating chemical mixtures into pure components is a crucial but energy-intensive process in industrial chemistry, accounting for 10 to 15% of global energy use. IPA, produced globally at over 3.5 million metric tons a year in a market exceeding $6.3 billion, is typically purified from water-laden mixtures using heating and distillation, methods that carry a significant energy and CO₂ footprint. The team turned instead to pervaporation, a membrane-based separation technique that bypasses vapor-liquid equilibrium constraints and uses only the latent heat of evaporation. The membrane, termed N-GOm, is built by co-assembling conventional graphene oxide (GO) nanosheets with a newly developed variant, nanoporous graphene oxide (NPGO), whose sheets carry smaller pores and oxygen-rich functional groups that increase water affinity. Combining the two nanosheet types creates an internal structure with two functions: narrow channels that block larger molecules, and hydrophilic regions that attract and transport water. The researchers report that this design raises the DFT-calculated water adsorption energy roughly 2.6-fold and lowers the diffusion energy barrier by about 40% compared with standard GO membranes.