Researchers at The University of Manchester’s National Graphene Institute in the UK have succeeded in making artificial channels just one atom in size for the first time. Now, a team of researchers at the University of Arkansas has found evidence to suggest graphene could also be used to provide an unlimited supply of clean energy.
Carbon atoms can form bonds in multiple ways. This exotic, strictly two-dimensional material conducts electricity well, but is not a superconductor. Scientists at HZB have found evidence that double layers of graphene have a property that may let them conduct current completely without resistance.
Scientists are exploring graphene’s ability to’ ripple’ into the third dimension. Now, physicists have announced that with it, they ‘ve been able to squeeze light into the space of a single atom – or a space smaller than the wavelength of light itself, something that shouldn’t be possible.
Graphene keeps surprising us: nobody thought that confining light to the one-atom limit would be possible, lead researcher Frank Koppens, from the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Spain said.
Yale researchers have developed a procedure that can replicate surface structures at the atomic scale – a breakthrough that could lead to better catalysts, improved data storage, and other novel applications. There are numerous potential applications for the technology, such as surface functionalization through atomically precise surface patterning.
Researchers from Brown University have shown experimentally that a boron-based competitor to graphene is a very real possibility. Wang and his research group, which has studied boron chemistry for many years, have now produced the first experimental evidence that such a structure is possible.
This is the first time Scientists at the Advanced Science Research Center ( ASRC ) at the Graduate Center, CUNY, worked to theorize and test how two layers of graphene – each one – atom thick – could be made to transform into a diamond-like material upon impact at room temperature. Density functional theory calculations suggest that, upon compression, the two-layer graphene film transforms into a diamond-like film, producing both elastic deformations and sp2 to sp3 chemical changes.
We can now finally simulate chemical problems that could not be overcome with the simulation techniques used up to now, says the first author of the study, Michael Gastegger.
Vázquez’s team has devised a new environmentally-friendly method for making graphene that could also make it easier to investigate in biological studies. “Now a designer can design three-dimensional topology comprised of interconnected graphene sheets” , said Xiaoyu Rayne Zheng, assistant professor with the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the College of Engineering and director of the Advanced Manufacturing and Metamaterials Lab. “We’ve been able to show you can make a complex, three-dimensional architecture of graphene while still preserving some of its intrinsic prime properties”.
