Graphene News - Page 1

A new collaborative study has reported a 17-carbon wide graphene nanoribbon and found that it has the tiniest bandgap observed so far among familiar graphene nanoribbons prepared through a bottom-up approach.

(a) Bottom-up synthesis scheme of 17-AGNR on Au(111), (b) high-resolution STM image, and (c) nc-AFM image of 17-AGNR. Image Credit: Junichi Yamaguchi, Yasunobu Sugimoto, Shintaro Sato, Hiroko Yamada.

The study is part of a project of CREST, JST Japan including Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), the University of Tokyo, Fujitsu Laboratories and Fujitsu.

Advanced materials group Versarien has been awarded a £5 million loan facility by a subsidiary of UK Research and Innovation.

The Versarien loan is for a project named G SCALE, (an acronym for Graphene-Seat, Concrete, Arch, Leisure, Elastomer) which is designed to enable Versarien to significantly increase its manufacture of quality assured graphene.

Scientists at EPFL have recently published a research that could open up new pathways to boosting the capacity of sodium-ion batteries. “Lithium is becoming a critical material as it is used extensively in cell-phones and car batteries, while, in principle, sodium could be a much cheaper, more abundant alternative,” says Ferenc Simon, a visiting scientist in the group of László Forró at EPFL. “This motivated our quest for a new battery architecture: sodium doped graphene.”

Since sodium is far more abundant than lithium, and the risk of fire is much lower with this battery chemistry, it is considered a potentially viable replacement to current lithium-ion technology. But sodium also has much lower energy density than lithium, which has so far limited uptake, particularly in the electric vehicle and consumer electronics segments, where the physical size of the battery is a deciding factor. EPFL's new work uses graphene to address this issue.

Zen Graphene Solutions has announced the closing of the first tranche of its previously announced private placement of units.

The Company raised gross proceeds of CAD$1,077,294.80 (around USD $788,115) under the Offering, which will be used to fund ongoing work on the Albany Graphite Project including graphene research and scale up, COVID-19 initiatives and other graphene applications development and for general corporate purposes. A second tranche is expected to close shortly in line with previous interest received.

Haydale has announced that, further to a successful Phase 1 collaboration agreement with IRPC Public Company (IRPC), a Phase 2 collaboration agreement has now been signed between the two companies. The Agreement will see IRPC developing transparent graphene and functionalized acetylene black conductive inks for RFID, NFC and related applications.

Haydale is to functionalize IRPC's acetylene black product to create the organic RFID ink. The success of this collaboration is expected to pave the way to numerous opportunities in printed electronic applications and be more environmentally friendly than existing inks.

Researchers at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) recently presented what they say is the first mechanically-tunable monolayer graphene QD whose electronic properties can be modified by in-plane nanometer displacements.

The ability to precisely manipulate individual charge carriers can be considered as a cornerstone for single-electron transistors and for electronic devices of the future, including solid-state quantum bits (qubits). Quantum dots (QDs) are at the heart of these devices.

Scientists from the Center for Photonics and 2D Materials of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), the University of Oviedo, Donostia International Physics Center, and CIC nanoGUNE have proposed a new way to study the properties of individual organic molecules and nanolayers of molecules. The approach is based on V-shaped graphene-metal film structures.

Image credit: Daria Sokol/MIPT Press Office

Nondestructive analysis of molecules via infrared spectroscopy is vital in many situations in organic and inorganic chemistry: for controlling gas concentrations, detecting polymer degradation, measuring alcohol content in the blood, etc. However, this simple method is not applicable to small numbers of molecules in a nanovolume. In their recent study, the research team proposed a way to address this issue.