Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Wednesday 7 March 2007, 9:18 PM
Graphene - watch this space
You may have noticed the odd article about a new form of carbon called graphene. Graphene is certainly an odd substance - it's a layer of carbon atoms in a hexagonal lattice, just one atom thick. Think of it as an unrolled nanotube or unpicked buckyball. Long thought impossible, about four years the stuff was discovered and, delightfully, it turns out to be easy to make. And it exhibits something called ballistic conductivity.
This is deeply interesting. A ballistic conductor is one in which an electron injected into one end is guaranteed to come out of the other - most conductors have a lot of electrons collide with various bits of atomic furniture, which gives them their electrical resistance. Ballistic resistance isn't zero but it's very low, and it doesn't depend on the length of the conductor.
I don't pretend to know how it works. I've got an overview paper from Nature that I'm churning through as I research a proper story on this, and it is incomprehensible on many levels. Massless Dirac fermions exhibiting quasiparticle behaviour, anyone? Wikipedia is no good to us here, Enrico. Bring me another icebag.
It's worth it, though. Graphene can be a metal or a semiconductor, it has exceptional heat conductivity (unsurprisingly), and it's creating a veritable firestorm of investigation. It promises no end of breakthrough devices, and while I've seen many fundamental physical discoveries promoted as What We Do Next only to become What We Gave Up On Last, this particular area has a richness of potential - and exciting early results - that certainly lights my lattice.
More later. That's a promise.
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