Graphene Could Become World's Best Super Battery

http://gizmodo.com/5051545/graphene-could-become-worlds-best-super-battery
You know graphene, the super material that's strong enough to withstand diamond cutters? Turns out that not only may it replace silicon as the de rigeur component of microchips, it's on track to becoming the next megabattery as well. Engineers at the University of Texas in Austin have found a way to store electrical charge in graphene-based ultracapacitor devices, and their discovery could revolutionize the renewable energy industry.

There are two ways to store electrical energy today—through traditional rechargeable batteries or in ultracapacitors, a newer tech that runs safer, cooler, and longer. The UofT researchers think their breakthough could end up doubling the capacity of current ultracapacitors, which are made with a different, less awesome form of carbon.

If everything works out, it could give a much needed boost to solar and wind energy industries, whose main challenge right now is energy storage for when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Beyond that, graphene ultracapacitors could end up improving the efficiency of all electrical appliances—cars, buses, trains, you name it.
Scientists Make World's Smallest Balloon, For Microscopic Birthday Parties

Graphene looks like it's going to be one of the "wonder materials" of the future, and a science team at Cornell University has just demonstrated the world's smallest balloon made of it. They stuck sheets of graphene over microscopic wells (1 to 100 square micrometers) cut into silica glass, trapping gas inside. By varying the pressure in the wells, they could make the graphene bulge inwards or outwards like a balloon, and the membranes proved pretty resilient: They could withstand several atmospheres of pressure. Though, like real birthday party balloons, the gas leaked out after a few days, it apparently did so through the glass, not the graphene. These tiny air pockets may have future uses as micro-sized weighing scales or even precise pressure sensors: It's another case of an invention waiting to find a use. [New Scientist]
Graphene Confirmed as the World's Strongest Known Material

The scientific community has been praising graphene as some sort of miracle material for years now—even going so far as to say that it could eventually replace silicon. Well, graphene can now add another statistic to its impressive resume now that researchers have confirmed it as the strongest material ever tested.

Two engineering professors at Columbia University tested graphene's strength at an atomic level by indenting a perfect sample of the material with a sharp probe made of diamond. The results confirm what many had suspected all along—and that will go a long way to bolster the case that graphene would be able to handle the heat produced in future ultrafast processors. [Technology Review]

Scientists Build Worlds Smallest Transistor: Just One Atom Thick


Just the other day we were banging on about graphene, the new "wonder material" based on graphite, and now a British team has used it to craft the world's smallest transistor. It's just one atom deep and ten wide, and we don't need to tell you that that's teeny. In fact, it's more than three times smaller than the 32nm transistors at the cutting edge of silicon-based microelectronics: so it looks like Gordon Moore's law of transistor shrinkage has a bit of life in it yet.

Of course advances in semiconductor transistor fabrication will shrink the minimum size down from 32nm soon enough, but when 10nm is reached the cold, hard laws of physics will get in the way. And that's why the graphene transistor is important, since the research team at the University of Manchester says their transistor is already working at just 1nm.

It's made by taking a sheet of graphene, made using standard semiconductor fab techniques, and carving it with an electron beam. This creates a central quantum-dot with a voltage-sensitive conductivity, much as in conventional transistors. Amazing. The one flaw is that for now it's hard to produce graphene in large quantities: the biggest crystals made so far are less than 0.1mm across, and that's too small for mass production. The Manchester team thinks it won't be long until that problem is solved though. Will that mean graphene-chip supercomputer power in pocket sizes? We'll have to see. [Wired Science]

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