Shaping Graphene

Work is going on in many labs around the world to find industrial processes to produce graphene and make use of it (you can produce graphene yourself by drawing a line with a pencil on a sheet of paper: it is very likely that somewhere in that line there are single atom layers that we called graphene). Others are studying the electrical properties of graphene…
This latter part is fascinating. So far scientists (and engineers) have been working with solids, 3D structures and have learnt the properties of the surfaces of these solids (as an example we understand very well that electrons in a conductor tend to move to the surface of the wire, and the higher the frequency the more this effect is important). With graphene, but also with new single atom layers of materials (like molybdenum), we no longer have a 3D structure but a 2D one and we need to understand what happens at the edges of this surface, that is in the 1D dimension.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have used a state of the art aberration corrected electron transmission microscope to study the electrical properties of graphene nano ribbons, GNR, ribbons with a width of 10nm.
In the words of Marija Drndic:  new text
“Graphene looks like chicken wire, and you can cut up this hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms in different ways, producing different shapes on the edge. But if you cut it one way, it might behave more like a metal, and, if you cut it another way, it could be more like a semiconductor.”  
It is quite amazing to see how we are approaching the mathematical "line". Through a mathematician will disagree (we are talking about something that is 0.1 nm thick!) in engineering terms there is nothing below that thickness and from an engineering standpoint we have really reached the 1D line. Who could have thought, just 20 years ago, that we would have reached the point where the orientation of atoms on a surface would be visible and would make a difference?

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.