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$10 Bet Brings Researchers Closer to Industrial Scale Graphene Production

Posted by Soulskill on from the all-about-the-hamiltons dept.

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.

13 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Mistake in summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Nature and Nature Chemistry are not the same journal.

  2. Incomprehensible by macraig · · Score: 4, Informative

    This summary truly is fucking. It's incomprehensible. Thanks for the editing rubber-stamp, Soulskill.

  3. what ? by bugs2squash · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So a, presumably, leading scientist balked at doing some research work for, presumably, sound technical and professional reasons, but all it took was the prospect of winning $100 to persuade her otherwise.

    This field needs to pay more!

    --
    Nullius in verba
    1. Re:what ? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So a, presumably, leading scientist balked at doing some research work for, presumably, sound technical and professional reasons, but all it took was the prospect of winning $100 to persuade her otherwise.

      Except that she lost $10. If she was purely financially motivated, she would have faked a negative result, and collected the $100.

    2. Re:what ? by tomhath · · Score: 2

      I see from the article that the reason she didn't want to try her technique on graphene was because the consensus of literature on the subject was that her technique couldn't possibly work.

    3. Re:what ? by kwbauer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      " the consensus of literature on the subject was that her technique couldn't possibly work."
      In other words, the science was settled, discussion was over and then we found out it wasn't.

    4. Re:what ? by someone1234 · · Score: 2

      From the article:

      "Kovtyukhova tried leaving out various agents and found that the oxidizing agent wasn't necessary for the reaction to take place." when using her mixture of acids (without the oxidizing agent) on boron nitride (a compound with a structure similar to graphite).

      Then she balked at trying the same mixture on graphite based on "the extensive literature saying that the oxidizing agent was required". Why? Why she tried to remove that frigging agent in the first place then?

      I mean: She knew that her technique without the oxidizing agent works on a material similar to graphite. She knew that the oxidizing agent is bad for graphite. Then why insisting on it???

      --
      Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
    5. Re: what ? by Fwipp · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Impostor syndrome - the feeling that everyone else is more qualified than you - is especially common in women in STEM fields. Makes you prone to thinking that your own ideas and innovations can't be right if they contradict established wisdom

  4. The horror by kaliann · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I live in fear of still being a lab rat in someone else's lab 14 years after I've earned my PhD and contributed pioneering advances to my field.

    Oh science, I love you, but there is some scary shit out there for those of us who don't get tenure. Or even a faculty position. Yikes.

  5. Confusing summary - here's my version by MattskEE · · Score: 4, Informative

    The summary was not clear so here is my version based on my understanding of the work:

    Graphite is composed of many randomly oriented and sized layers of graphene. Intercalation is a process where compounds or ions can be inserted between the layers of a layered material such as graphite. These Penn State reseachers have discovered a new way to perform this intercalation by leaving out a strong oxidizing agent which was thought to be necessary but would damage the graphene.

    The research advisor Thomas E. Mallouk suggested trying it without the oxidizer. The researcher Nina Kovtyukhona was reluctant to perform this experiment as she thought it would be a failure. Her advisor persuaded her to try it by making a bet that he would pay her $100 if it succeeded, and she would pay him $10 if she failed. The experiment was a success, and researchers now have a new avenue to explore for synthesizing graphene.

    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.

    A new route to making graphene has been discovered that could make the 21st century's wonder material easier to ramp up to industrial scale.

    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.

    1. Re:Confusing summary - here's my version by SpammersAreScum · · Score: 3, Informative

      The summary was not clear so here is my version based on my understanding of the work:

      ...

      The research advisor Thomas E. Mallouk suggested trying it without the oxidizer. The researcher Nina Kovtyukhona was reluctant to perform this experiment as she thought it would be a failure. Her advisor persuaded her to try it by making a bet that he would pay her $100 if it succeeded, and she would pay him $10 if she failed. The experiment was a success, and researchers now have a new avenue to explore for synthesizing graphene.

      From the article:

      "I kept asking her to try it and she kept saying no," Mallouk said. "Finally, we made a bet, and to make it interesting I gave her odds. If the reaction didn't work I would owe her $100, and if it did she would owe me $10. I have the ten dollar bill on my wall with a nice Post-it note from Nina complimenting my chemical intuition."

      Looks like you got it backwards in your version.

  6. Regular bet writ large to make interesting news? by Ocker3 · · Score: 2

    I'm betting that the bet in the story is either a fiction (to get journalists to cover the story) or a regular part of some lab's cultures "That'll Never work!" "Bet you it will!" "How Much" "10 gets you 100, I'll put it in writing" "You're on!" "Ooh, that's interesting..."

  7. This is huge! by joocemann · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I am super excited. The graphene capacitors from UCLA (about 18 months ago) can now be scaled up. They hired some company to try to scale up their tech, but maybe this finding can help. The implications for this is that new technologies are going to arrive in your hands and homes. Enjoy.