30
nanotimes
10-01 :: January 2010
News in Brief
Graphene //
Breakthrough For the Super Material
T
he hyper-quick electronics of the future will require new
materials and the hottest around is graphene – a single la-
yer of carbon atoms. Graphene produced using a method de-
veloped at Linköping University is now being used as part of
a study at Chalmers University of Technology, where it has
been shown that graphene maintains the same high quality
as silicon, thus paving the way for large-scale production.
The research group at Linköping University of Technology,
led by Professor Rositza Yakimova, together with a research
group at Chalmers, led by Associate Professor Sergey Kubat-
kin at the Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience,
MC2, along with colleagues in the United Kingdom and Italy,
has demonstrated that Swedish graphene offers a high degree
of accuracy for quantum mechanical effects – something that
is otherwise only achieved in well-established semiconductors
such as silicon and gallium arsenide.
„The measurements indicate an improvement of four orders of
magnitude or 10,000 times greater accuracy than the best re-
sults that have been achieved using exfoliated graphene,“ says
Sergey Kubatkin, Associate Professor at Chalmers University of
Technology.
The results provide the first resistance standard, i.e. a measu-
re of electronic resistance that is dependent purely on natu-
ral constants and which functions at a temperature of 4.2 K.
The two resistance standards that have existed up to now are
based on silicon or gallium arsenide but only work at very low
temperatures and are considerably more difficult to produce
and use.