September 2010

Researchers led by John Miller have developed a new ultracapacitor design that uses nanometer-scale fins of graphene. They say that such an ultracapacitor can charge in less than a millisecond (normal ultracapacitors take a few seconds). The design uses electrodes that consist of up to 4 sheets of graphene. The graphene is formed so that it stuck out vertically from a 10-nanometer-thick graphite base layer.

The teams' next plan is to increase the capacitance of the device by making the nanosheets more parallel and taller—attempting to find the ideal balance between creating more charge storage space and restricting the flow of ions in the electrolyte.

Graphene Devices has raised over $600,000 several state and federal project awards. The company is exploring novel uses for Graphene and ways to optimize the production. The company is using a process developed at the University of Buffalo.

Here's the list of projects that the company received:

- $466,000 from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) to refine the firm's production process and study graphene's potential as a replacement for the costly conductive coatings on solar cells and display technologies. NYSERDA announced the two-year award in May.

Researchers from Case Western Reserve University and other institutions have created graphene-polymer solar cells that can be manufactured using solution processing. Polymer based solar cells are thought to be cheaper than silicon based ones, but less efficient. Using carbon nanotubes can increase the efficiency by increasing the surface/interface area and charge separation and transport.

The researchers say that Graphene has the highest room-temperature mobility for electron and hole transport among all known carbon nanomaterials and its one-atom thick. A 2-D carbon network provides a much higher specific surface area (hence, a larger interface in a polymer matrix) than carbon nanotubes

Researchers from the University of Illinois used a dry deposition method they developed to deposit pieces of graphene on semiconducting substrates and on the electronic character of graphene at room temperature they observed using the method. The reported their finding in a paper titled "Separation-Dependent Electronic Transparency of Monolayer Graphene Membranes on III-V Semiconductor Substrates".

The paper gives insight into a "understanding substrate-graphene interactions toward integration into future nanoelectronic devices". The project investigated the electronic character of the underlying substrate of graphene at room temperature and reports on "an apparent electronic semitransparency at high bias of the nanometer-sized monolayer graphene pieces observed using an ultrahigh vacuum scanning tunneling microscope (UHV-STM) and corroborated via first-principles studies." This semitransparency was made manifest through observation of the substrate atomic structure through the graphene.

Graphene Supermarket, which offers a broad range of graphene nanomaterials, announced that they have added a new product called Q-Graphene. This is a nanomaterial that consists of hollow, porous, multi-wall carbon nanospheres with a narrow size distribution and an average particle size of less than 100 nm. The company claims that there is a high demand for this material in materials engineering for energy storage, supercapacitors, nanosensors, catalysis, and composite materials. Moreover, Q-Graphene is being considered for potential use in a variety of biomedical applications such as intracellar drug delivery, cancer treatment and high-performance bioimaging.

You can order the Q-Graphene online. It costs $100 for 1 gram (or $325 for 5 grams).

Researchers in China and Japan have developed a graphene oxide based fluorescence assay for fast, ultra-sensitive, and selective detection of protein and demonstrated its use for detection of a prognostic indicator in early-stage cancer, cyclin A₂.

Although the researchers have managed to detect cyclin A₂ in their lab set-up with high sensitivity and specificity, this method still can not be applied to detect cyclin A₂ in clinical samples due to the trace amount of cyclin A₂ in the cell total protein. The team is trying to incorporate a signal amplification step to increase the output signal and detection sensitivity to solve this issue.

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have "unveiled" a quartet of graphene's electron states and discovered that electrons in graphene can split up into an unexpected and tantalizing set of energy levels when exposed to extremely low temperatures and extremely high magnetic fields.

Read more over at e!science-news

Researchers from UCLA says they have developed a new Graphene transistor - running at 300Ghz - the fastest to date. The team, led by professor of chemistry and biochemistry Xiangfeng Duan, has developed a new fabrication process for graphene transistors using a nanowire as the self-aligned gate.