MORE FACTS ON GRAPHENE

The interest and curiosity in the wonder material graphene seems to be increasing by the day. This is another article on graphene after a previous post which had attracted considerable viewership.  Some of the facts have already been given in the previous post but are revisited with a fresh perspective.

1.     Graphene is a sheet of carbon atoms that are arranged in a hexagonal chicken-wire like structure. The material was discovered in 2004 by Kostya Novoselov and Andre Geim, who used adhesive tape to detach a single layer of atoms from graphite.

2.     Graphene is lighter, stronger, harder and more flexible than steel on a local level. It has the highest thermal conductivity of all materials.

3.    Graphene has zero band gap which makes it potentially attractive in the field of photovoltaics.  But this means that graphene cannot stop conducting and has a poor capability to “turn off,”. Thus, graphene cannot make a good transistor and researchers have been finding ways to make it more efficient in this task through complex arrangements of the material.

4.     Graphene has the possibility of ballistic conduction of electrons. The reason for this property is that in graphene, the mean free path (distance an electron can travel freely without being scattered) is of the order of 65 microns. When the mean free path is longer than the dimensions of the material, ballistic transport results because then the mobility is extremely high.

5.     Graphene has the highest current density (a million times that of copper) at room temperature; the highest intrinsic mobility (100 times more than in silicon). This implies that it can carry more electricity more efficiency, faster and with more precision than any other material.

6.     Graphene is a highly transparent materials absorbing just 2.3 percent of light that is incident on it. This property makes it potentially suitable for applications in the field of transparent conducting electrodes.

7.     Graphene has a high elasticity and can be stretched 20 percent of its length.

8.     Graphene is the most impermeable material ever discovered and even helium atoms cannot squeeze through. Thus, even the smallest quantity of a gas will get caught in its lattice, changing its electrical properties. Hence, the possibility of it being used in the field of gas sensors.

9.     Graphene has a derivative called graphene oxide which is hightly effective at killing E.Coli. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences demonstrated that Escherichia coli is fatally damaged by the two water dispersable graphene derivates, namely graphene oxide and sheets of reduced graphene oxide.