UTSA team takes Nobel-prize winning work on graphene a step further

“Imagine batteries, capacitors, solar cells, video screens, and fuel cells as thin as a piece of paper,” study author says.

The method was discovered by UW scientists and confirmed in tests at Argonne

Dozens of new two-dimensional materials similar to graphene are now available, thanks to research from University of Manchester scientists

Berkeley Lab's SINGLE provides images of individual nanoparticles in solution

Researchers have solved the long-standing conundrum of how the boundary between grains of graphene affects heat conductivity in thin films of the miracle substance — bringing developers a step closer to being able to engineer films at a scale useful for cooling microelectronic devices and hundreds of other nano-tech applications.

A simulated flip from metal to insulator might be used to encode information.

One of the barriers to using graphene at a commercial scale could be overcome using a method demonstrated by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

In 2013 James Hone, Wang Fong-Jen Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia Engineering, and colleagues at Columbia demonstrated that they could dramatically improve the performance of graphene—highly conducting two-dimensional (2D) carbon—by encapsulating it in boron nitride (BN), an insulating material with a similar layered structure. In work published this week in the Advance Online Publication on Nature Nanotechnology’s website, researchers at Columbia Engineering, Harvard, Cornell, University of Minnesota, Yonsei University in Korea, Danish Technical University, and the Japanese National Institute of Materials Science have shown that the performance of another 2D material—molybdenum disulfide (MoS2)—can be similarly improved by BN-encapsulation.

Less than 1 percent of Earth’s water is drinkable. Removing salt and other minerals from our biggest available source of water—seawater—may help satisfy a growing global population thirsty for fresh water for drinking, farming, transportation, heating, cooling and industry. But desalination is an energy-intensive process, which concerns those wanting to expand its application.