April 2021

G6 Materials (Formerly called Graphene 3D Lab) announced its financial results for Q1 2021, with revenues of $263,425 CAD and a net loss of $321,152.

Looking back at the last nine-month period (ended February 28, 2021), G6's revenues were $1.94 million CAD, up 276% from $515,930 in the prior year. The increase in revenues was attributed to consulting services provided to third-party clients, the ongoing sale of the Company’s air purification products and the receipt of a one-time payment as per the terms of a license and option agreement.

Researchers from Spain, Finland and France have demonstrated that magnetism and superconductivity can coexist in graphene, opening a path towards graphene-based topological qubits.

Schematic illustration of the interplay of magnetism and superconductivity in a graphene grain boundary, a potential building block for carbon-based topological qubits Credit: Jose Lado/Aalto University

In the quantum realm, electrons can behave in interesting ways. Magnetism is one of these behaviors that can be seen in everyday life, as is the rarer phenomena of superconductivity. Intriguingly, these two behaviors are often antagonists - the existence of one of them often destroys the other. However, if these two opposite quantum states are forced to coexist artificially, an elusive state called a topological superconductor appears, which is useful for researchers trying to make topological qubits.

Researchers at Duke University have created transistors with three carbon-based inks. The all-carbon thin-film transistors were made using crystalline nanocellulose as a dielectric, carbon nanotubes as a semiconductor, graphene as a conductor and paper as a substrate. This type of component could assist in addressing the environmental problem of accumulation of electronics that are non-recyclable.

Silicon-based computer components are probably never going away and we don’t expect easily recyclable electronics like ours to replace the technology and devices that are already widely used, said Professor Aaron Franklin, an electrical engineer at Duke University. But we hope that by creating new, fully recyclable, easily printed electronics and showing what they can do, that they might become widely used in future applications.

The Graphene Flagship's new Graphene Enabled High-Energy Batteries for Automotive Applications (GrEEnBat) Spearhead project will aim to improve battery technology for electric vehicles.

The output of the strategic three-year project will be an automotive battery module prototype that is composed of 60 to 90 battery electric vehicle (BEV) cells. The core of innovation will be the negative electrode of the cell, composed of a silicon-graphene composite developed during earlier Graphene Flagship research projects.

Anaphite, a UK-based company that was founded to explore ways to incorporate graphene into Li-ion batteries to improve battery life and charging times, has raised about £1.2 million (over USD$1,665,000) from investors in a new funding round.

The funding round was led by Zero Carbon Capital, which is investing £300,000. Zero Carbon Capital backs UK-based hard-science start-ups on a mission to address the toughest problems of climate change.

University of Cambridge researchers have designed a lithium-ion battery that can be directly charged in sunlight. This was done in an effort to improve the general process of connecting solar panels to batteries to store energy when the sun is shining.

The idea is to simplify how solar energy is harvested and stored, says Michael De Volder, a mechanical engineer at the University of Cambridge who led the work. If the team can improve the efficiency and lifetime of the hybrid device, its cost will likely be lower than combining solar cells and batteries. For the price of a battery, you get both functionalities, he says.

Researchers from France, South Korea, and Japan have created a graphene-based beam splitter for electronic currents. The tunable device’s operation is directly comparable to that of an optical interferometer. The team believes that the technology could enable electron interferometry to be used in nanotechnology and quantum computing.
Quantum Hall valley splitter - schematic representation of the p − n junction. Image from article

An optical interferometer splits a beam of light in two, sending each beam along a different path before recombining the beams at a detector. The measured interference of the beams at the detector can be used to detect tiny differences in the lengths of the two paths. Recently, physicists have become interested in doing a similar thing with currents of electrons in solid-state devices, taking advantage of the fact that electrons behave similarly to waves in the quantum world.

Researchers at the University of Michigan (U-M) have developed a real-time, 3D motion tracking system developed that combines transparent light detectors with advanced neural network methods. The system could one day replace LiDAR and cameras in autonomous technologies and future applications include automated manufacturing, biomedical imaging and autonomous driving.

The imaging system relies on transparent, highly sensitive graphene photodetectors developed by Zhaohui Zhong, U-M associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and his group. They’re believed to be the first of their kind.

A research team at the Center for Molecular Spectroscopy and Dynamics (CMSD) within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in Seoul, South Korea, and the Korea University, recently revealed the origin of the wettability of graphene. Wettability is the ability of the interfacial water to maintain contact with a solid surface, and it depends on the material's hydrophobicity. Unlike most materials, the wettability of graphene varies depending on the type of substrate. More specifically, the wettability of the substrate is weakly affected by the presence of a single graphene layer on its surface. Such a peculiar wettability of graphene has been described by the term "wetting transparency" because the wetting properties at the graphene-water interface have little effect on the substrate-water interaction through the thin graphene.

In their new work, the team succeeded at observing the hydrogen-bond structure of water molecules at graphene-water interfaces using a technique called 'vibrational sum-frequency generation spectroscopy (VSFG)'. VSFG is a second-order nonlinear spectroscopy that can be used to selectively analyze molecules with broken centrosymmetry. It is an ideal method for studying the behavior and structures of water molecules at the graphene interface since the water molecules in the bulk liquid are not visible due to their isotropic distribution of molecular orientations.