Slashdot Mirror
Unzipping Nanotubes Makes Superfast Electronics
Al writes "Two research groups have found a way to unzip carbon nanotubes to create nanoribbons of graphene — a material that has shown great promise for use as nanoscale transistors, but which has proven difficult to manufacture previously. A team led by James Tour, a professor of chemistry and computer science at Rice University, and another led by Hongjie Dai, a professor of chemistry at Stanford University, both figured out ways to slice carbon nanotubes open to create the nanoribbons. The Stanford team was funded by Intel, and the Rice group is in talks with several companies about commercializing their approach."
Hey, that's what an ex-girlfriend of mine called it: her nano-tube. Bitch. Oh, carbon nano-tubes.....gotta hit Cancel.
Nanoribboned for her pleasure.
She did say you were pretty quick.
Yes, but it isn't obvious that it is feasible to do that.
So now we have a method to bulk-produce graphene; but do we have a way to implement it in devices?
In any case, this is good. Nanowire diameter shouldn't be that hard to manipulate. The more you can manipulate something in synthesis for functional properties, the better it is for application. Look at doping silicon for example.
In any case, I wonder what the lifetime of a graphene-based device would be. Molecular compounds aren't always the most stable. That's one of the main reasons that they are being held back from adoption.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
[mage] what should I give sister for unzipping?
[Kevyn] Um. Ten bucks?
[mage] no I mean like, WinZip?
-Bash.org
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
...he's just making up new words on the fly.
With all the unzipping going on, making up words on the fly is probably OK in this instance.
And available in nanosize for your anatomy!
Both these groups have succeeded where many others have tried and failed (even with very similar ideas). It's great work. As the summary suggested though, they've taken one hard to work with material and using a complicated process, made an even harder to work with material. This is great for doing science, as graphene ribbons are a huge pain to make, and this should open up more labs to investigating their properties.
If we're going to have graphene consumer electronics though, it's going to be based on the wafer-scale CVD manufacturing process developed in Korea and MIT.