MIT

A team of researchers led by Columbia University have developed a new method to finely tune adjacent layers of graphene, in a research that provides new insights into the physics underlying the material's intriguing characteristics.

"Our work demonstrates new ways to induce superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene, in particular, achieved by applying pressure," said Cory Dean, assistant professor of physics at Columbia and the study's principal investigator. "It also provides critical first confirmation of last year's MIT results - that bilayer graphene can exhibit electronic properties when twisted at an angle - and furthers our understanding of the system, which is extremely important for this new field of research".

Researchers from the U.S. Army, in collaboration with RDECOM Research Laboratory, the Army's corporate research laboratory (ARL), Stanford University, MIT, University of Southern California and Argonne National Laboratory, have discovered a way to get more energy out of energetic materials containing aluminum, common in battlefield systems, by igniting aluminum micron powders coated with graphene oxide. This research could lead to enhanced energetic performance of metal powders as propellant/explosive ingredients in Army's munitions.

This discovery makes use of graphene oxide as an effective light-weight additive for practical energetic applications using micron-size aluminum powders (µAl), i.e., aluminum particles one millionth of a meter in diameter.