Scientists Build Graphene From Scratch, Atom By Atom

MrSeb writes "You've heard of 'designer babies,' the idea that you can customize a baby by altering its DNA, but now a team of researchers from Stanford University and the Department of Energy have meddled around with the very fabric of reality and created the very first 'designer electrons.' The bulk of the universe is made up from just a few dozen elements, and each of these elements is made up of just a few subatomic particles: electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, and so on. For the most part, the properties of every material — its flexibility, strength, conductivity — is governed by the bonds between its constituent atoms, which in turn dictate a molecule's arrangement of electrons. In short, if you can manually move electrons around, you can create different or entirely new materials. That's exactly what Stanford University has done: Using a scanning tunneling microscope, the team of researchers placed individual carbon monoxide molecules on a clean sheet of copper to create 'molecular graphene' — an entirely new substance that definitely isn't graphene, but with electrons that act a lot like graphene (abstract). It is now possible, then, for scientists to create entirely new materials or tweak existing materials — like silicon or copper, or another important element — to make them stronger or more conductive. Where will this particular avenue lead us?"

Comments

The bulk of the universe... Wrong!

[FridayBob]

... The bulk of the universe is made up from just a few dozen elements, and each of these elements is made up of just a few subatomic particles: electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, and so on. ...

Wrong! The bulk of the universe -- about 70% -- is made of dark energy and we have no idea what that's made of. Then there's dark matter -- about 25% (no idea what that's made of either) -- while less than 5% is made of normal, barionic matter (electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, and so on).

They read and understood which citation?

[perpenso]

I think the bigger question is, "how would you move this process to a FAB"? I don't think it will happen soon, but it seems to me we would need robotic STMs? Research is continuing... I assume.

Nice generic smaller technology quip, but I think you missed the point of TFA and what the posters you were responding to (hint, they read and understood it). You should actually read it, its more about a change in the understanding of physics than new chips.

I don't think so. The cited and heavily quoted article seems to start with a fundamental misunderstanding of freshman level physics: "the bulk of the universe is made up from just a few dozen elements, and each of these elements is made up of just a few subatomic particles: electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, and so on". Quarks are not subatomic particles, they are the elemental particles that subatomic particles are made from. In other words your proton is made of quarks. That makes phrases like "meddled around with the very fabric of reality" a bit suspicious. Reading the article confirms this suspicion.

If you look at the second citation, the one from real scientists, they are using phrases like "new nanoscale materials with useful electronic properties". So if you only read the fist citation then yes we are on the verge of star fleet manual type science. However if you the second article we are closer to new fabrication technologies.

Re:Alchemy?

[semi-extrinsic]

Well it turns out that if the author's article isn't misquoting Manoharan, he actually did claim that the electrons had no mass and were moving at the speed of light. That would be a huge scientific breakthrough if it were true.

As a physicist, I would say that Manoharan was probably spot on, but the journalist failed to understand and relay him correctly. You're correct that "massless electrons moving at lightspeed" is a scientific breakthrough, that's why it was awarded the Nobel prize in 2010.

To explain: in graphene, the dispersion relation becomes a bit funny. See explanation on Wikipedia. This means that electrons behave as if they were massless and moving at the speed of light. They are neither, of course, they just behave as if they are.

Car analogy: if you drive your car on ice covered with water, it will behave as if it had no brakes. It still has brakes, it just behaves as if it didn't.