Monthly Archive, September 2021 - Page 1

A team of researchers, led by Klaus Ensslin and Thomas Ihn at the Laboratory for Solid State Physics at ETH Zurich, together with colleagues at the University of Texas in Austin (USA), has observed a novel state in twisted bi-layer graphene. In that state, negatively charged electrons and positively charged (so-called) holes, which are missing electrons in the material, are correlated so strongly with each other that the material no longer conducts electric current.

Image by Peter Rickhaus / ETH Zurich (taken from Nanowerk)

“In conventional experiments, in which graphene layers are twisted by about one degree with respect to each other, the mobility of the electrons is influenced by quantum mechanical tunneling between the layers”, explains Peter Rickhaus, a post-doc and lead author of the study. “In our new experiment, by contrast, we twist two double layers of graphene by more than two degrees relative to each other, so that electrons can essentially no longer tunnel between the double layers.”

As part of a £8.6 million research project, announced in support of the government’s UK Innovation Strategy, University of Cambridge engineers will explore how Digital Twins, smart materials, data science and robotic monitoring can work together to develop a connected physical and digital road infrastructure system.

This project is one of eight Prosperity Partnerships being supported with an investment of almost £60 million by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), businesses and universities.

The Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre (GEIC) at The University of Manchester was the venue for the latest act of pioneering work in using advanced materials in construction to promote sustainability in the sector.

Nationwide Engineering, Tier 2 partners of the GEIC, re-laid parking bays on the service road adjacent to the Centre earlier this month, using its graphene-enhanced Concretene product as a ‘living lab’ to test performance in exterior conditions.

This is a guest-post by Jeffrey Draa, CEO at Grolltex - producing graphene biosensors on silicon chips today shows low yields, high cost and restrictive packaging options, limiting scalability and market penetration. But optimization may be here.

Monolayer, electronics grade graphene is propelling advanced biosensing in many key areas. Google the search term, ‘graphene biosensor’, and one will see thousands of next-generation, life enhancing applications being refined in research labs worldwide. This one atom thick material is creating biosensing and detection performance in speed and sensitivity not possible before. Areas such as cancer and virus detection, new drug discovery, genomics, allergens, glucose and many more are starting to see unimagined advances. By far, the number 1 use case for monolayer graphene films today is atomic level biosensing.