MIT

A team of researchers at MIT, Raytheon BBN Technologies and Columbia University have used graphene to design a fast yet highly sensitive bolometer that can work at room temperature and may even be less expensive. Bolometers are devices that monitor electromagnetic radiation through heating of an absorbing material. Most such devices have limited bandwidth and must be operated at ultralow temperatures, which damages their usefulness.

The findings of this work could help pave the way toward new kinds of astronomical observatories for long-wavelength emissions, new heat sensors for buildings, and even new kinds of quantum sensing and information processing devices, the multidisciplinary research team says.

Researchers at MIT have developed a method that might enable the production of long rolls of high-quality graphene. The continuous manufacturing process can reportedly produce five centimeters of high-quality graphene per minute. The longest run was nearly four hours, and it generated around 10 meters of continuous graphene.

MIT is referring to the development as “the first demonstration of an industrial, scalable method for manufacturing high-quality graphene that is tailored for use in membranes that filter a variety of molecules.” These membranes could be used in biological separation or desalination, for example. The researchers drew from the common industrial roll-to-roll approach blended with chemical vapor deposition, a common graphene-fabrication technique.