The Next Graphene? Shiny and Magnetic, a New Form of Pure Carbon Dazzles (sciencemag.org) 36
sciencehabit quotes Science magazine:
A "happy accident" has yielded a new, stable form of pure carbon made from cheap feedstocks, researchers say. Like diamond and graphene, two other guises of carbon, the material seems to have extraordinary physical properties. It is harder than stainless steel, about as conductive, and as reflective as a polished aluminum mirror. Perhaps most surprising, the substance appears to be ferromagnetic, behaving like a permanent magnet at temperatures up to 125 degrees C -- a first for carbon. The discovery, announced by physicist Joel Therrien of the University of Massachusetts in Lowell on 4 November here at the International Symposium on Clusters and Nanomaterials, could lead to lightweight coatings, medical products, and novel electronic devices....
The magnetism adds to a suite of properties never before seen together in a form of pure carbon. They include tremendous hardness that presumably results from the bonds joining adjacent layers: "We've tried scratching it with steel wool, and it comes off clean," Therrien says. "The only thing we can say verifiably scratches it is a diamond scribe." Though the group has yet to measure the tensile strength of the material, the fact that vanishingly thin flakes hold together at millimeter size suggest it may be as strong as some metals, he says. Then there is the mirrorlike appearance, seen in photos Therrien showed at the meeting. The team's measurements indicate that the film, even when just 50 nanometers thick, reflects more than 90% of incoming light at wavelengths ranging from the far-ultraviolet to the midinfrared. That attribute could make it a useful reflective coating, more durable than the standard aluminum, for mirrors in cameras and telescopes.
Its electrical conductivity turned out to be just shy of that of stainless steel. But it can also display other electronic properties. Annealing the material by slowly heating it to 1000 degrees C dims its shine and turns it into a semiconductor with a band gap -- the energy required to liberate an electron -- similar to that of amorphous silicon, which can turn light into electricity. That makes it a candidate material for photovoltaic cells, Therrien suggests.
The magnetism adds to a suite of properties never before seen together in a form of pure carbon. They include tremendous hardness that presumably results from the bonds joining adjacent layers: "We've tried scratching it with steel wool, and it comes off clean," Therrien says. "The only thing we can say verifiably scratches it is a diamond scribe." Though the group has yet to measure the tensile strength of the material, the fact that vanishingly thin flakes hold together at millimeter size suggest it may be as strong as some metals, he says. Then there is the mirrorlike appearance, seen in photos Therrien showed at the meeting. The team's measurements indicate that the film, even when just 50 nanometers thick, reflects more than 90% of incoming light at wavelengths ranging from the far-ultraviolet to the midinfrared. That attribute could make it a useful reflective coating, more durable than the standard aluminum, for mirrors in cameras and telescopes.
Its electrical conductivity turned out to be just shy of that of stainless steel. But it can also display other electronic properties. Annealing the material by slowly heating it to 1000 degrees C dims its shine and turns it into a semiconductor with a band gap -- the energy required to liberate an electron -- similar to that of amorphous silicon, which can turn light into electricity. That makes it a candidate material for photovoltaic cells, Therrien suggests.
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One can only assume you are referring to your post, because it has literally nothing to do with the story.
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his is going to be the next element dreams are made of unless some capitalist corporation patents it to keep the worlds hands off it. Which. Has. Happened. Before.
Ok so where has this happened before or are those all separate unrelated sentences.
While this material I am sure has applications I fail to see that it is some sort of super material.
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Apparently they haven't done x ray crystallography on it yet in order to determine the structure so they don't even know what it is. That seems odd.
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Whoever told you pencil lead is graphene is mistaken or lying to you. Although it makes about as much sense as the other things you said.
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https://www.wikihow.com/Make-G... [wikihow.com]
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You seem to have confused "you can make one substance from another" with "these two substances are the same thing."
You might find the wikipedia entry for graphene a bit more informative than Wikihow. The article is pretty good, and worth reading. Relevant to this thread:
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Graphene has distinct properties, is classified as a separate allotrope, and, as the IUPAC says, is distinct from graphite because of that structure. You can think of it however you want, but the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has decided that separating the layers makes it distinct. Also the Nobel committee.
Re: Old is new again (Score:2)
the first step. (Score:4, Interesting)
regardless of how well this particular form of carbon turns out, discovering a way to make many different allotropes [wikipedia.org] seems more important.
Therrien is bullish about the long-term potential of geometrical frustration to synthesize novel allotropes of carbon and other elements. “Even if it works only for carbon, the very fact that there are probably hundreds of different allotropes that you might be able to make using this approach is going to really open things wide up.”
BTW, this was yet another accidental discovery made by a scientist.
Therrien says that on 13 November 2017, after teaching an evening class, he returned to his lab to check on his oven and noticed the smell of tar. The inside of the furnace was caked in black pitch. But the copper foil was covered in something that looked like polished silver.
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BTW, this was yet another accidental discovery made by a scientist.
Therrien says that on 13 November 2017, after teaching an evening class, he returned to his lab to check on his oven and noticed the smell of tar. The inside of the furnace was caked in black pitch. But the copper foil was covered in something that looked like polished silver.
There must be no better feeling for a research scientist than for a failed experiment to make you say, "What the fuck is going on here?"
I need my car's body made from this! (Score:1)
That's what I love about science... (Score:1)
There's all kinds of cool stuff happening all the time with pretty smart people going "who would have thunk that?"
Science: Because no matter how hard you try, you aren't going to pray that rocket into space.
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If you read about some of the Science and engineering guys working on the Moon project you will find that some of them were praying hard to find the answers to get those rockets to their destination, believing that God revealed the science to get them there
Believing something doesn't make it so.
and engineers turned the science into rockets that could make use of the knowledge.
Rockets don't make use of knowledge, they make use of fuel and oxidizer. Or maybe fuel and nuclear fuel.
Any which way Science does not build rockets, engineers do.
And prayer doesn't get payloads into space, rockets do.
I can has pan? (Score:2)
If they can scale it up, it would make a dandy coating for pans. Teflon is terrible for the environment, and produces toxics when overheated.
I'm sure it would do a lot of more exotic and interesting things as well, but I was just reading about the evils of PTFE
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Before we all get too far ahead of ourselves...
the fact that vanishingly thin flakes hold together at millimeter size suggest it may be as strong as some metals
...and as dangerous as asbestos?
Plastic took 30-40 years to take off (Score:5, Insightful)
The first plastics (synthetic polymers) were created in 1869 and 1907. Use of plastic in day-to-day life took off during WW2 and just after it. WW2 created a need for new materials and processes, plastic was waiting in the wings ready to go.
Many uses for graphene have been found in laboratories. It's probably about ready to take off whenever the catalytic event occurs. Maybe that's a spike in steel prices, maybe a breakthrough makes space travel nearly as common as air travel and graphene is used to make it happen, who knows what the event will be. Graphene is now finishing up the same research stage that plastic and went through before being widely used.
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Which raises the question, how disposable or recyclable is graphene? [quora.com]
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Marie Curie once discovered that Radium could be extracted from an otherwise useless rock. Literal tons of this useless rock would be mined just to produce a few grams of Radium, which was used to make glow-in-the-dark paints. So much waste rock was mined that it made ceramic glazes (one of the only other known uses) incredibly cheap and abundant.
You may have heard of it, it's called Uranium.
Well, we're well on our way (Score:1)
to creating UFO's that you can't really see because of nearly complete reflections, that can recharge by hovering over power lines, and...
Well, we're still working on the cow and human snatching part.
But we have scientists working HARD on the problem!
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we're still working on the cow... snatching part.
check a supermarket... solved!
Correction (Score:5, Informative)
*Correction, 15 November, 11 a.m.: An earlier version of this story incorrectly suggested U-carbon was the first carbon allotrope to display ferromagnetism at relatively high temperatures, when in fact other forms of pure carbon have displayed that behavior.
I apologize for RTFA, where do I turn in my slashdot cred?
The word you're looking for: (Score:1)
TTSA (Score:1)
Reflectivity? (Score:1)
Minor Inconsistency in TFA? (Score:1)
From the article: " ... But rather than pumping in a feed gas of the usual small hydrocarbons, such as methane, he injected a more complex precursor: 2,2 dimethylbutane, a cheap petrochemical that is available by the ton. As a branched hexane, the chemical has six carbon atoms arranged along a bent backbone. .."
2,2 dimethylbutane doesn't have a 'bent backbone' of six carbon atoms.
The most you can trace is four.
It branches to 3 identical methyl groups.