News 'Molecular graphene' promises light-speed electronics

A new material, inspired by graphene, promises light-speed mass-free electron movement.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/03/15/molecular-graphene/1

 

Graphene, the new Dremel.

 

Sick

 

Reads like a tech upgrade in GalCiv.

 

But does it run Crysis?



(Had to be asked...)

 

Interesting stuff. Now don't get me wrong, I love being able to read an article like this, it's light reading for a scientist, but perhaps it's worth having little explanations for things at the end of the article? It's just I doubt that most users really know what an allotrope. Just a thought

 

Yes please.

 

Feels like i have been hearing about Graphene for many years now. Do something practical with it already.

 

Surely if they are moving molecules seemingly at the speed of light, then this sounds like a good concept for a propulsion system to me.

 

Correct me if i'm wrong (seriously, I don't know if i'm right), but electrons already move ridiculously fast within a wire, but the net movement of charge is far slower as the electrons bounce about so much. What's important is the overall drift velocity of the electrons, which is actually incredibly slow.
I wonder if the speeds that are talked about here are the electrons' individual speeds, or the net speed in one direction?

 

well, it says that they moved through the copper at the speed of light, almost as if they were in a vacuum, and when electrons are in a vacuum, i dont think they bounce around much, as there is not anything to bounce off of.

 

Facinating! However you do hear a lot about scientific 'breakthroughs' such as this. It will be much more significant if something like this makes it into consumer products in the not too distant future.

 

too bad apple won't use this anytime soon.. it conflicts with plans to release the ipad 4 two months from now

can they sell it without ruining the whole upgrade cycle in place? they'll probably dumb it down before it goes public- with 2 guys blowing up every encryption scheme ever made in a bell labs somewhere.. on the side (to huangs disapprovement) it'll fold it all at once (while playing crysis )

those guys better watch it.. they'll be thrown in obamas gitmo

 

The only reason electrons don't travel though material at the speed of light is that they encounter atoms. If electrons are traveling though material at the speed of light they are not interacting with atoms (this is how super conductors work). This is why I'm not sure that this will be all together practical for electronics. It sounds to me like a room-temp superconductor, which I am highly skeptical of. But if it is it would be great for things like power lines. If the electrons don't interact with atoms then you won't lose any power via wires (which is a big problem with transmitting power over long distances now).

 

If they have managed to get electrons to though matter at the speed of light then they have indeed created a super conductor (and since it isn't stated above I'll assume it doesn't have to be cooled to super low temps to work) if this is the case then they are pretty much guaranteed a Nobel prize in physics. If this is what that paper truly describes then I would expect to be hearing A LOT more about it. At this point I doubt that they've done that this article says they have. Any way this was published in Nature just last week so there hasn't been much time for others to verify the experiments, we don't even know if this is for real (also Nature has been known to publish utter BS in the past, although it isn't exactly common for them to do so).
For them not to describe this as a super conductor implies that the electrons interact with the material (as does their saying that CO2 molecules are responsible for the effect) and if that's true then they can't be going the speed of light.
sorry for the double post.

 

Does this mean we can use pencils to overclock again?

 

We spent 60 years just proving that this stuff exists and isolating it, you'll have to forgive the scientific community if it takes them a decade or two to make your computer faster

Really, this stuff was only properly discovered 6 or 7 years ago. It's going to take a while before it can be used, the price is still dropping by orders of magnitude every year or so. It was recently one of the most expensive materials on the planet. Four years ago it was 100 million USD per cm^2. Now its $100 per cm^2. It needs to drop by a lot more.

 

It was expensive, but its not antimatter.

 

This is true. But if we're talking about making things out of it that we currently make from silicon, which is essentially free, then we have to recognise that material costs alone are currently prohibitive. That's not considering process costs, or the fact that we haven't got any commercial stage applications yet.