14 DAY TRIAL // Graphene is a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon and was really hard to separate from graphite in a laboratory until 2004, when researchers used nothing more than clear adhesive tape to break apart the countless layers of graphene from an everyday pencil. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Department of Physics, Applied Physics and Astronomy works now on a research project trying to find out how graphene's conductive properties can be used in nanoelectronics.
Saroj Nayak is an associate professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and, together with his team, he demonstrated that the length and the width of the material has a direct impact over its conductive properties. Their findings were published in the journal Applied Physics Letters under the title "Energy Gaps in Zero-Dimensional Graphene Nanoribbons". When produced in the form of a long and thin 1-D nanoscale ribbon, graphene has both metallic and semiconducting electrical properties.
When the researchers took a 1-D nanoscale graphene wire and spliced it in pieces only a few nanometers long, so the length was only a few times greater than the width of the ribbon, it was discovered that the length of the ribbon may be used to manipulate and modify the material's energy gap. The energy gap is determining if a material is conducting (metallic or semiconducting) or is isolating.
Usually, when graphene is synthesized in a laboratory, it comes as a mix of both metallic and semiconductive materials, while the team's findings offer a solution to make separate batches of one type or another that could someday be used as a replacement for copper in the computer processor manufacturing process. As the size of computer chips decreases, so does the size of the copper connectors, leading to an abrupt increase in electrical resistance that in turn translates in heat dissipation because fewer electrons are allowed to pass through the thin copper wires. Using graphene, the small size of processor connectors is no longer a problem because the material has better electrical conducting properties than copper does.
"Fundamentally, at this point, graphene shows much potential for use in interconnects as well as transistors," Nayak said, as cited by the site Physorg.com. Even if using graphene in computer processor is still a number of years away, major chip producers like IBM and Intel already took notice of this wonder material.