Graphene-Info: the graphene experts

Researchers at Nagoya University have synthesized a helical graphene nanoribbon (GNR) whose handedness can be switched on demand. The team built what they call a poly[4]helicene nanoribbon, a ladder-type polymer made entirely of [4]helicene subunits, and showed that dissolving it in a chiral solvent locks the ribbon into a single, uniform spiral direction, right- or left-handed depending on which mirror-image form of the solvent is used.

Helical GNRs have drawn interest as a route to chiral carbon materials for optical and electronic devices, but achieving a controllable, switchable twist has been an unsolved problem. [4]Helicene, a four-ring helicene unit, was considered too configurationally unstable for this purpose, since it flips its own handedness too quickly to hold a fixed twist on its own. The team took the opposite approach: rather than avoiding this instability, they built a long ladder-polymer chain entirely out of [4]helicene units, fusing them together through quantitative intramolecular multifold cyclization of a nonhelical precursor polymer. Because each subunit is mechanically coupled to its neighbors along the rigid, constrained framework, the helicity inversions of adjacent units became correlated, producing long, interconverting sequences of right- (P) and left- (M) handed [4]helicene subunits rather than random, uncorrelated flipping.

Sparc Technologies has completed the first commercial delivery of its ecosparc® graphene additive to a Tier 1 coatings customer, fulfilling a 160kg order from the company's production facility in Adelaide, South Australia, for use in a high-performance protective coating.

The delivery follows the launch of two ecosparc®-enhanced coatings products since May 2026, including AkzoNobel's commercial release of ecosparc-enhanced Interzone 954, and represents the first widely used protective coating product to incorporate Sparc's graphene additive. 

Researchers at the National University of Singapore, the Center for Neurophysics and Neuromorphic Technologies (Moscow), Queen's University (Kingston), HSE University (Moscow), the National Institute for Materials Science (Tsukuba) and the University of Manchester, have shown that magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG) can be switched from an insulating to a metallic state by exposure to very weak far-infrared (FIR) radiation, opening a path toward ultrasensitive detectors for one of the least-exploited bands of the electromagnetic spectrum.

MATBG is formed by stacking two graphene sheets with a relative twist of about one degree. At this "magic" angle, the electronic bands narrow dramatically, strengthening interactions between electrons. Under the right gate voltage, these interactions produce a correlated insulator - a fragile collective electronic state in which conduction is strongly suppressed, distinct from an ordinary band insulator.

Researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS), led by Assistant Professor Ahmet Avsar of the university's Centre for Advanced 2D Materials, have combined a record-fidelity graphene spin-transport platform with magnetic-proximity band engineering to move graphene closer to practical spin-logic and spin-memory devices, across two complementary studies. The work targets one of graphene spintronics' core limitations: interfacial disorder at the electrical contacts that inject and detect spin, which has historically scrambled spin information before it can be read out electrically.

The first study rebuilt the graphene spin-device fabrication process around an inert-glovebox van der Waals assembly, laminating and cleaning the stack to produce atomically flat hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) tunnel barriers rather than the oxide barriers more commonly used in graphene spin valves. That interface quality translated directly into device performance: nonlocal spin signals reached up to 1.6 kΩ at 2.5 K, spin polarization approached 90% (89% in the lead device), spin lifetime measured about 2.04 nanoseconds with a spin diffusion length of about 4.74 μm, and gate-tunable magnetoresistance exceeded 80%. Critically for eventual device use, the effect persisted at room temperature, where the same device retained a nonlocal spin resistance of about 160 Ω and roughly 42% spin polarization.

Researchers at Romania's National Institute for Research and Development in Microtechnologies (IMT-Bucharest), working with the "Petru Poni" Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry in Iasi, the Horia Hulubei National R&D Institute for Physics and Nuclear Engineering's Extreme Light Infrastructure-Nuclear Physics facility, the National University of Science and Technology POLITEHNICA Bucharest, and Hellenic Mediterranean University in Greece, have shown that adding small amounts of graphene to samarium-doped zinc oxide (ZnO:Sm) nanocomposites raises dielectric conductivity by up to seven orders of magnitude, from around 10⁻⁹ S/cm for pure ZnO to 10⁻³–10⁻² S/cm at the highest graphene loadings tested.

ZnO is a widely used wide-bandgap semiconductor (~3.37 eV) valued for its thermal and chemical stability, low cost, and non-toxicity, with applications spanning optoelectronics, energy, environmental remediation, antibacterial textiles, and pharmaceuticals. Its practical use in electronic, energy, and thermoelectric applications, though, is limited by relatively low electrical conductivity stemming from a low charge-carrier concentration. Researchers have previously addressed this through doping, engineered oxygen vacancies, nanostructuring, and surface functionalization. Doping with trivalent rare-earth ions such as Sm³⁺ improves conductivity by inducing structural defects and oxygen vacancies that modulate carrier concentration, while separately, incorporating graphitic carbon into ZnO matrices has been shown to improve charge transport and suppress electron-hole recombination, given graphene's high carrier mobility, large surface area, and strong conductivity. According to the authors, combining rare-earth doping with graphene in a single ZnO system has been little studied, and no prior work had looked specifically at electrospun Sm-doped ZnO modified with low graphene loadings.

Researchers at CICATA-Legaria, the National Laboratory for Energy Conversion and Storage at Mexico's Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) in Mexico City, have developed a composite of pyridine-coordinated transition-metal nitroprussides and reduced graphene oxide (rGO) as a bifunctional pre-electrocatalyst for zinc-air batteries (ZABs). Testing cobalt, nickel, and copper versions of the material, the team found that each metal favors a different half of the battery's oxygen chemistry, with the cobalt variant striking the best overall balance.

Rechargeable zinc-air batteries are attractive for their high theoretical energy density, low cost, and inherent safety, but their air cathode has to drive both the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) during discharge and the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) during charging, reactions with sluggish kinetics that typically require different types of catalysts. The field's benchmark catalysts, platinum for ORR and iridium or ruthenium oxides for OER, are scarce and expensive, pushing research toward cheaper first-row transition metals such as cobalt, nickel, and copper. Nitroprussides, a family of cyanometallate coordination polymers with the general formula T[Fe(CN)₅NO], offered the team a synthetically simple, structurally tunable starting point for that search.

Researchers at Italy's National Research Council (CNR) - specifically its Institute for Organic Synthesis and Photoreactivity (Cnr-Isof) and Institute of Nanostructured Materials (Cnr-Ismn) - working with Ca' Foscari University of Venice, the University of Ferrara, and the University of Bologna, have developed a graphene-based bioelectronic platform that combines sustainable materials, biochemical sensing, and neural stimulation in a single biodegradable device, aimed at both monitoring and modulating activity in brain tissue.

The platform is built from poly(lactic acid) (PLA) and graphene oxide, processed through a green, water-based manufacturing route and turned into conductive electrodes through laser functionalization rather than more environmentally costly fabrication methods. The approach is meant to address the growing footprint of implantable and wearable medical electronics by keeping the device fully biodegradable and biocompatible while still delivering the electrical performance needed for neural interfacing.