Graphene nanobubbles could lead to smaller and more powerful transistors

1. Recently, the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2010 was awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene".http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2010/

2. Graphene is a one-atom-thick planar sheet of carbon atoms that are densely packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice. It can be visualized as an atomic-scale chicken wire made of carbon atoms and their bonds. The name comes from graphite + -ene; graphite itself consists of many graphene sheets stacked together.

3. Graphene nanobubbles could lead to smaller and more powerful transistors • Michael Crommie, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and his team discovered that if you strain and stretch Graphene then you get little wrinkles: nanobubbles. Electrons around these bubbles acted as if they were experiencing up to 300 Tesla of magnetic force (despite the lack of a sufficient magnetic field). ability to control the existence of such powerful magnetic-like forces could potentially lead to the development of smaller, more powerful transistor switches in semi-conductors.

4. Graphene is the fastest spinning object ever • Scientists from the University of Maryland created a spinning graphene disk that is the fastest spinning object ever: 60 million rotations per minute. The scientists sprayed charged graphene flakes a micrometer wide into a vacuum chamber. Once there, oscillating electric fields trapped the flakes in mid-air. They then set them spinning using a light beam, meaning it passes its momentum to objects in its path. As a result, the flakes started spinning. • so- at least the Graphene is strong enough for such speeds.

5. Today's silicon-based computer processors can perform only a certain number of operations per second without overheating. But electrons move through graphene with almost no resistance, generating little heat. What's more, graphene is itself a good thermal conductor, allowing heat to dissipate quickly. Because of these and other factors, graphene-based electronics could operate at much higher speeds. "There's an ultimate limit to the speed of silicon--you can only go so far, and you cannot increase its speed any more," de Heer says. Right now silicon is stuck in the gigahertz range. But with graphene, de Heer says, "I believe we can do a terahertz--a factor of a thousand over a gigahertz. And if we can go beyond, it will be very interesting."

6. rtist's impression of a DNA molecule (helix) moving through a tiny slit in a graphene sheet (shown in blue). (Courtesy: Henk Postma) • The “wonder material” graphene could soon be used to analyse DNA at a record-breaking pace. That’s the claim of a physicist in the US who has proposed a new way of reading the sequence of chemical bases in a DNA strand by sending the molecule through a tiny slit in a graphene sheet.