Graphene is a wonderful material that has been investigated for many applications. Recently two scientific teams published results about the use of Graphene as a superconductor and as a framework to study cosmic rays.

Superconductivity in calcium-intercalated bilayer graphene

A Japanese team from the university of Tohoku in Sendai (Japan) published a recent report about superconductivity in a calcium-intercalated bilayer graphene C(6)CaC(6) fabricated on silicon carbide. Since single layer graphene (2D) has been produced out of graphite (3D), physical properties and applications have been studied extensively. Despite many attempts superconductivity in undoped Graphene has not been discovered yet.

Graphite intercalated compounds (GICs) is a family of materials that is sharing many common features with graphene. Since GICs are known to exhibit such superconductivity, researchers tried to investigate doped graphene and experimented phonon mediated superconductivity in graphene earlier this year while others proposed a theoretical explanation.

Last week, the Japanese team came out with a promising bilayer graphene sheet : C(6)CaC(6). This material is the thinnest 2D limit of GICs and it was not sure beforehand that it would exhibit superconductivity. Using angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy and scanning tunneling microscopy, they investigated the structure and electronic states of their material. Their observation is that the electronic distribution at the Brillouin-zone center is similar to the one found in superconducting GICs. If superconductivity is indeed proved, this paves the way to 2D superconductors and will provide a good set of materials for applications in nanotechnology.

Source : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23139407?dopt=Abstract

Graphene to be used as an astrological lab

A very interesting use of graphene have also been published this month. When people think about graphene, properties such as light absorption, mechanical strength or electronic conductivity come in mind. However, an international team of scientists from Europe and South Africa investigate in a totally new direction and used the electrons motion in graphene to model the dynamics of massless particles. In other words, they claim that electrons in graphene behave as cosmic rays.

The team used Brownian motion to study the dynamics of electrons on what they called their “graphene mini-laboratory”. Cosmic rays are highly energetic particles created by supernovae and stars outside the solar system. While they travel close to the speed of light, their motion still follows the Brownian statistic. Researchers played on the geometry, temperature and electric field to reproduce the motion of cosmic rays. 

Source : http://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjb/e2012-30716-7

Applications using graphene

However, graphene has many other applications among which Batteries, Ultracapacitors, Electronics, Optoelectronics and LEDs/OLEDs. The bright future of this material is to be seen by the emerging demand about such material by technological industries. If you want to discover more about this product and Chemical Vapor Deposition Graphene, we suggest you to register to the mailing list and follow us on Twitter or Google+.