Archives - Chemistry: Page 8
Author: amparo enriquez (Wed Dec 27, 2006 2:09 am)
Title: Chemistry
Carbon structures provide new devices and remarkable physics
Since the 1985 discovery of buckyballs (such as the buckminsterfullerene a nanoscopic sphere of 60 carbon atoms connected in a pattern similar to a traditional soccer ball), researchers have focused intense attention on various chicken-wire-like carbon structures. The latest addition to the menagerie is graphene, a flat single layer of carbon atoms bonded together in the hexagonal pattern of praphite.
In November 2005 two independent research groups, one led by Andre K. Geim of the University of Manchester in England and the other by Phillip Klim of Columbia University, experimentally confirmed some extraordinary electronic properties of graphene: the effective mass of electrons in graphene is zero, and they behave like elementary particle obeying a version of Einsteinian relativity instead of Newton’s laws of motion. The results open up a remarkable new domain of relativistic physics that can be explored in tabletop experiments.
The development of graphene devices, which might eventually outperform silicon, took a major step forward when Walter de Heer of the Georgia Institute of Technology, along with his collaborators there and at the National Center for Scientific Research in France, used standard microelectronics industry techniques to make graphene transitors and other circuitry. The ease with which graphene can be shaped to order could give it the edge over carbon nanotubes, which are much harder to build into complex devices.