Future Timeline

As the mostly widely used material on Earth, concrete has a massive carbon footprint that scientists are working to chip away at in all sorts of ways. Recent research projects have demonstrated how the wonder material graphene could play a role in this and now we're seeing the first real-world deployment of the technology, with engineers using so-called "Concretene" to form the foundations of a new gym in the UK.

As the world's strongest artificial material, graphene may have a lot to offer the world of construction, among its many other potential uses. Scientists have previously found success incorporating it into the concrete manufacturing process to make the finished product stronger and more water-resistant, while one research project even demonstrated how this graphene can be recovered from old tires.

The freshly poured Concretene is the handiwork of scientists at the University of Manchester and construction firm Nationwide Engineering. To form the material, the team adds tiny amounts of graphene to water and cement, where it both acts as a mechanical support and offers an extra catalyst surface for the chemical reactions that turn the mix into the concrete paste. The end result is improved bonding at a microscopic scale, and material that is around 30 percent stronger than standard concrete.

“In this work we have demonstrated that magic-angle graphene is the most versatile of all superconducting materials, allowing us to realize in a single system a multitude of quantum electronic devices. Using this advanced platform, we have been able to explore for the first time novel superconducting physics that only appears in two dimensions,” says Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT and leader of the work. Jarillo-Herrero is also affiliated with MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory.

June 7, 2021

Graphene can be used for ultra-high density hard disk drives (HDD), with up to a tenfold jump compared to current technologies, researchers at the Cambridge Graphene Center have shown.

The study, published in Nature Communications, was carried out in collaboration with teams at the University of Exeter, India, Switzerland, Singapore, and the US.

HDDs first appeared in the 1950s, but their use as storage devices in personal computers only took off from the mid-1980s. They have become ever smaller in size, and denser in terms of the number of stored bytes. While solid state drives are popular for mobile devices, HDDs continue to be used to store files in desktop computers, largely due to their favorable cost to produce and purchase.

HDDs contain two major components: platters and a head. Data are written on the platters using a magnetic head, which moves rapidly above them as they spin. The space between head and platter is continually decreasing to enable higher densities.

Graphene can be made to superconduct by placing it next to a Bose-Einstein condensate – a form of matter in which all the atoms are in the same quantum state. According to the theorists who discovered it, this new type of superconductivity stems from interactions between the electrons in graphene and quasiparticles called “bogolons” in the condensate. If demonstrated experimentally, the work could make it possible to develop new types of hybrid superconducting devices for applications in quantum sensing and quantum computing.

Conventional superconductivity occurs when phonons – quasiparticles that arise from vibrations in a material’s crystal lattice – cause electrons in the material to pair up despite their mutual electromagnetic repulsion. If the material is cooled to sufficiently low temperatures, these paired electrons (known as Cooper pairs) can travel through it without any resistance.

Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) form when bosons, or particles with integer quantum spin, are cooled until they are all in the same quantum state. Within this special “fifth state of matter”, quasiparticles called Bogoliubov excitations can develop. Named after the Russian physicist Nikolaï Bogoliubov, who was the first to provide a theoretical description of them, these quasiparticles are usually known as bogolons. Ivan Savenko, who led the research at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in Korea, explains that bogolons are similar to phonons in the sense that they also serve as mediators for electron-electron attractions.

Since the first reported production in 2004, researchers have been hard at work using graphene and similar carbon-based materials to revolutionize electronics, sports, and many other disciplines. Now, researchers from Japan have made a discovery that will advance the long-elusive field of nanographene magnets.

In a study recently published in Journal of the American Chemical Society, researchers from Osaka University and collaborating partners have synthesized a crystalline nanographene with magnetic properties that have been predicted theoretically since the 1950s, but until now have been unconfirmed experimentally except at extremely low temperatures.

Graphene is a single layer, two-dimensional sheet of carbon rings arranged in a honeycomb lattice. Why does graphene excite researchers? Graphene has impressive properties—it exhibits efficient, long-distance charge transport and has a much higher strength than similarly thick steel. Nanostructures of graphene have edges that exhibit magnetic and electronic properties that researchers would like to exploit. However, graphene nanosheets are difficult to prepare and it's difficult to study their zigzag edge properties. Overcoming these challenges by using a simpler, yet advanced, model system known as triangulene is something the researchers at Osaka University aimed to address.

Researchers have used direct chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth of wafer-scale, high-quality graphene on dielectrics for versatile applications. However, graphene synthesized this way has shown a polycrystalline film with uncontrolled defects, a low carrier mobility, and high street resistance; therefore, researchers aim to introduce new methods to develop wafer-scale graphene. In a new report now published in Science Advances, Zhaolong Chen and an international research team in nanochemistry, intelligent materials and physics, in China, U.K. and Singapore, described the direct growth of highly oriented monolayer graphene on films of sapphire wafers. They achieved the growth strategy by designing an electromagnetic induction CVD at elevated temperature. The graphene film developed in this way showed a markedly improved carrier mobility and reduced sheet resistance.

Although twisted sheets of double bilayer graphene have been studied extensively the past few years, there are still pieces missing in the puzzle that is its phase diagram—the different undisturbed, ground states of the system. Writing in Nature Physics, Carmen Rubio-Verdú and colleagues have found a new puzzle piece: an electronic nematic phase.

First described in another state of matter called a liquid crystal, a nematic phase occurs when particles in a material break an otherwise symmetrical structure and come to loosely orient with one another along the same axis. This phenomenon is the basis of the LCD display commonly used in televisions and computer monitors. In an electronic nematic phase, the particles in question are electrons, whose behavior and arrangement in a material can influence how well that material will conduct an electrical current in different directions.

"The data are amazing," says co-author Rafael Fernandes, a theoretical physicist at the University of Minnesotawho met senior author Abhay Pasupathy as a postdoc at Columbia. "You can clearly see that there's a symmetry being broken."

Broken symmetries often yield novel quantum effects, he explained. Twisted double bilayer graphene usually has three-fold symmetry—no matter how many times you rotate an image of it in 120 degree turns, it stays the same. Using scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy to record the electronic properties of individual atoms, Rubio-Verdú and her colleagues recorded twisted graphene at different voltages. "What we see are stripes," she said—those are electrons re-aligning and breaking the sample's symmetry, even as the underlying atomic lattice remains the same. In this observed nematic phase, the image can now only be flipped 180 degrees.

Researchers from Paragraf and Queen Mary University of London demonstrated the successful fabrication of an Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) with a monolayer graphene anode, replacing ITO in organic light-emitting diodes. The new study is published in the journal Advanced Optical Materials.

Indium is one of the nine rarest elements in the Earth's crust and is on the EU's list of critical materials. However, it is widely used, mostly in the form of indium tin oxide (ITO), and a key part of the touch screens on our mobile phones and computers. Most homes will have many items containing indium, it's used in flatscreen TVs, solar panels, as well as LED lights in our homes.

This Innovate UK-funded research opens the door to a radical change in the potential of high-tech devices of the future by removing a limiting ingredient, Indium.

Professor Colin Humphreys of Queen Mary and Paragraf, says: "Because of its importance and scarcity there have been many attempts to replace ITO, but no material has been found to have a comparable performance in an electronic or optical device until now."

Lay some graphene down on a wavy surface, and you'll get a guide to one possible future of two-dimensional electronics.

Rice University scientists put forth the idea that growing atom-thick graphene on a gently textured surface creates peaks and valleys in the sheets that turn them into "pseudo-electromagnetic" devices.

The channels create their own minute but detectable magnetic fields. According to a study by materials theorist Boris Yakobson, alumnus Henry Yu and research scientist Alex Kutana at Rice's George R. Brown School of Engineering, these could facilitate nanoscale optical devices like converging lenses or collimators.

Their study appears in the American Chemical Society's Nano Letters.

They also promise a way to achieve a Hall effect — a voltage difference across the strongly conducting graphene —that could facilitate valleytronics applications that manipulate how electrons are trapped in "valleys" in an electronic band structure.

Valleytronics are related to spintronics, in which a device's memory bits are defined by an electron's quantum spin state. But in valleytronics, electrons have degrees of freedom in the multiple momentum states (or valleys) they occupy. These can also be read as bits.

Flashing graphene into existence from waste was merely a good start. Now Rice University researchers are customizing it.

The Rice lab of chemist James Tour has modified its flash Joule heating process to produce doped graphene that tailors the atom-thick material's structures and electronic states to make them more suitable for optical and electronic nanodevices. The doping process adds other elements to graphene's 2D carbon matrix.

The process reported in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano shows how graphene can be doped with a single element or with pairs or trios of elements. The process was demonstrated with single elements boron, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur, a two-element combination of boron and nitrogen, and a three-element mix of boron, nitrogen and sulfur.

The process takes about one second, is both catalyst- and solvent-free, and is entirely dependent on "flashing" a powder that combines the dopant elements with carbon black.

Doping graphene is possible through bottom-up approaches like chemical vapor deposition or synthetic organic processes, but these usually yield products in trace amounts or produce defects in the graphene. The Rice process is a promising route to produce large quantities of "heteroatom-doped" graphene quickly and without solvents, catalysts or water.
Rice University chemists have created a catalyst- and solvent-free flash Joule heating process for manufacturing b

The discovery of superconductivity in two ever-so-slightly twisted layers of graphene made waves a few years ago in the quantum materials community. With just two atom-thin sheets of carbon, researchers had discovered a simple device to study the resistance-free flow of electricity, among other phenomena related to the movement of electrons through a material.

New research led by University of Massachusetts Amherst assistant professor Jinglei Ping has overcome a major challenge to isolating and detecting molecules at the same time and at the same location in a microdevice. The work, recently published in ACS Nano, demonstrates an important advance in using graphene for electrokinetic biosample processing and analysis, and could allow lab-on-a-chip devices to become smaller and achieve results faster.

The process of detecting biomolecules has been complicated and time-consuming. "We usually first have to isolate them in a complex medium in a device and then send them to another device or another spot in the same device for detection," says Ping, who is in the College of Engineering's Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department and is also affiliated with the university's Institute of Applied Life Sciences. "Now we can isolate them and detect them at the same microscale spot in a microfluidic device at the same time—no one has ever demonstrated this before."

Researchers from Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), have proposed a laser-assisted layer-by-layer covalent growth method to prepare highly crystalline all-graphene macrostructures (AGMs). The study was published in Advanced Functional Materials.

Graphene is a two-dimensional carbon material known for its exceptional mechanical, electrical, thermal, and optical properties. To facilitate its large-scale applications, it is crucial to efficiently prepare and assemble graphene at the macroscopic level.

However, conventional methods such as liquid phase self-assembly, 3D printing, and catalytic template techniques can only achieve non-covalent weak interactions between graphene sheets, resulting in discontinuities in the crystal structure. This limitation hampers electrical properties of graphene macrostructures.

In this study, a covalently interconnected AGM with micro-to-macro scalable electrical properties was prepared by lamination of microporous polyethersulfone (PES) membrane. Each stack layer of PES membrane was completely carbonized and seamless interlayer boding was achieved in an air environment using a laser.

Harder than a diamond, stronger than steel, as flexible as rubber and lighter than aluminum. These are just some of the properties attributed to graphene. Although this material has sparked great interest in the scientific community in recent years, there is still no cheap and sustainable enough method for its high-quality manufacturing on an industrial scale.

A research team from the University of Córdoba (UCO) has just published a new prototype in the journal Chemical Engineering Journal that could precisely represent a great step forward towards the large-scale production of this material, first synthesized in 2004, with those responsible winning a Nobel Prize six years later.

This new technological design, which has already been registered for evaluation as a patent and is based on a previous patent of the team itself, increases the production of graphene by more than 22%, with the process maintaining the high quality that characterizes graphene synthesized with this technology.

19 hours ago

Graphene has lived up to its promise in the lab. Now, EU researchers are working on supporting its wider adoption in high-end electronics, photonics and sensors.

Dr. Inge Asselberghs has been closely involved in advanced graphene research over the past decade. Today, she's at the forefront of efforts to bring this "miracle material" out of the lab and into society.

Asselberghs is part of an international team of researchers that set up a prototype manufacturing facility for graphene and other 2D materials at Imec, a leading global nanoelectronics research institute based in Leuven, Belgium.

The team pools expertise from 11 universities, research institutes and companies in six European countries as part of the 2D experimental pilot line (2D-EPL). Their aim is to advance the production and integration of graphene in prototypes for use in high-end electronics, photonics and sensors.

Graphene has the potential to fundamentally transform many areas of technology. Consisting of just a single layer of carbon atoms, it is extremely thin.