There’s a bit of a buzz word doing the rounds at the moment. If you’ve not heard of Graphene before, you soon will do.
So, what is it then? Well, Graphene is a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms, densely packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice and most easily visualised as an atomic-scaled sort of chicken wire made of carbon atoms and their bonds. Graphene is so thin that a stack of 3 million sheets would be only one millimeter thick.
In 2008 graphene produced by exfoliation was one of the most expensive materials on Earth, with a sample that can be placed at the cross section of a human hair costing more than £1,000. Since then, procedures have been scaled up, and now companies sell graphene by the ton.
In 2010, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene“.
So what’s so great about it then?
Well researchers in Korea and Japan have recently fabricated films of graphene and engineered them into transparent electrodes, which can be incorporated into touchscreen panel devices. And now experts predict that graphene will be found in consumer products within a couple of years with better transparency and a tougher surface to boot (ITO-based touchscreens have a finite life span, whereas graphene-based screens could last essentially forever).
The production of graphene needs just a tiny amount of carbon source and the copper substrate is recyclable, so it is much more environmentally friendly than current touchscreen production methods.
So watch this space, and the device you’re browsing on might well be graphene itself…
