Slashdot Mirror
Graphene Sheets Get Easier To Manufacture
grunaura writes "South Korean researchers have devised a way to create graphene sheets one centimeter square using a hydrocarbon vapor on heated nickel. It's touted as being more efficient than the current process where graphene sheets are pressed, and there is evidence that 'the quality of graphene grown by chemical vapour deposition is as high as mechanically cleaved graphene.' Graphene is relatively new, but not to Slashdot. This round of news highlighting the technology focuses on the bendable nature of graphene sheets, as opposed to the memory applications or capacitive properties discussed here previously. These films are the closest we have come to superconductors at room temperature."
Graphene is not (at all) a RT superconductor. It's a room temperature quantum conductor with zero-mass relativistic charge carriers, and a mobility that makes modern transistors look very, very slow. That's plenty cool enough. Our danger is not failing to deliver HTSCs, but if we fail to deliver THz transistors. That's where the effort is and that's where the funding is.
It is the lowest resistance material at room temperature. Most people don't know what a ballistic conductor is, or how the conduction mechanism in graphene works. A word they do understand is "superconductor," so that ends up in all the press releases. Some clever PR guy makes a connection between "almost zero resistance" and "almost a superconductor." He doesn't know any better. Rest assured that the physicists working on graphene do know the difference between the two, and we're not stealing anyone's thunder.