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$10 Bet Brings Researchers Closer to Industrial Scale Graphene Production
AaronW writes:
After trying and failing to convince Nina Kovtyukhona to test her technique of separating layers of graphite and boron nitride to instead try graphene, Thomas E. Mallouk made a bet with Nina that her technique method would work. If it worked, Nina would owe him $10. If it didn't, he would owe her $100. The result was published in Nature yesterday (abstract). Thomas is $10 richer, and we are a step closer to industrial scale graphene production.
Nature and Nature Chemistry are not the same journal.
This summary truly is fucking. It's incomprehensible. Thanks for the editing rubber-stamp, Soulskill.
The summary was not clear so here is my version based on my understanding of the work:
My personal thought is that while this is scientifically interesting and could lead to some engineering benefits down the road this will not lead to large scale production of graphene since it is just splitting apart graphene sheets from graphite, and these sheets are generally quite small. Large scale production to me would be getting fairly good uniform growth or deposition of graphene over large areas of a substrate which is of the order of 1cm or larger so that it can eventually be scaled up to the 30cm and 45cm wafers in the silicon industry. So unless other researchers come up with a way to make a graphene boule composed of decent sized graphene sheets this technique does not seem useful for commercial electronics.
One things which makes graphene research expensive is that most growth methods end up with just little flecks of graphene material in random locations on a substrate, so a researcher or technician has to manually search for these and place contacts and gates on them using a manual lithography tool. It could even be automated but this would still be orders or magnitude slower than competing technologies.
Whenever a press release uses language like this I am forced to point out that graphene so far has had zero compelling results for electronics applications. It is soundly beat by silicon and III-V semiconductors in terms of speed and dynamic range. Graphene transistors can be made reasonably fast (for certain but not all definitions of fast) but even so the signals that they can handle are only very tiny because of the lack of a bandgap. It has some wonderful properties but also some terrible ones which make its applicability suspect.