[HPI will, in rare occasions, bring you non-religious articles of interest. This is one of them.]
UK, May 21, 2011 (BBC): The material graphene was touted as “the next big thing” even before its pioneers were handed the Nobel Prize last year. Many believe it could spell the end for silicon and change the future of computers and other devices forever.
According to the Nobel prize committee, a hypothetical one-metre-square hammock of perfect graphene could support a four-kilogram cat – the hammock would weigh 0.77 milligrams, less than a cat’s whisker, and would be virtually invisible. “Our research establishes graphene as the strongest material ever measured, some 200 times stronger than structural steel,” mechanical engineering professor James Hone, of Columbia University, “It would take an elephant, balanced on a pencil, to break through a sheet of graphene the thickness of film.”
Said to be the strongest material ever measured, an improvement upon and a replacement for silicon and the most conductive material known to man, its properties have sent the science world – and subsequently the media – into a spin.
But companies like IBM and Nokia have also been involved in research. IBM has created a 150 gigahertz (Ghz) transistor – the quickest comparable silicon device runs at about 40 Ghz. “In terms of the speed of the transistor, we currently see no intrinsic limits into how fast it can go,” says Dr Yu-ming Lin, of IBM.
The band structure of graphite was first theorized by PR Wallace in 1947, though for it to exist in the real world as graphene layers was thought almost impossible, and ways to produce it were elusive for decades. Such is the mystique of this material that, due to the timing of Dr. Wallace’s discovery, conspiracy theorists believe he was inspired by materials from the Roswell crash site.
The SKKU graphene research laboratory has a video on some speculative applications of graphene in computing here.