
Electrons in Graphene Behave Like Light, Only Better - jonbaer
http://engineering.columbia.edu/news/james-hone-electrons-graphene
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ahmedfromtunis
When I first read the title, I thought it was about some frameworks, platforms
or the like. I'm doomed.

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paulddraper
There's some trouble to be found with project naming.

\---

I once searched for documentation on Facebook's programming language Hack.

"hack facebook" was a sub-optimal search.

\---

I later looked for LESS rules writter for Twitter's Pants build tool.

The results for "pants less" were...interesting.

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M_Grey
I'm constantly confused and misled (my own fault) by a variety of project
names. They're often either foods, or physics. "Delicious Snickers running
Event Horizon..." that kind of thing.

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Natsu
That's how you tell if a project was named before or after lunch.

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neom
Bet this would be really good for audio.

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the8472
For a carbon-based 3-layer noise-dissipation system perchance?

[https://i.imgur.com/Z9vv5OF.png](https://i.imgur.com/Z9vv5OF.png)

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jtchang
Reading stuff like this makes me think what key pieces of technology made
things viable a few years ago. For example what breakthrough made SSDs so
widely available and cheap?

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ChuckMcM
Generally repeatable mass production. Once you can repeatedly produce the item
you can price it for how easily it can be produced and then scale up if the
market will pay that price. Chips, SSDs, computers, plastics, anti-stick pans,
you name it.

SSD's became "a thing" when they had the write endurance to replace hard
drives. The problem of write endurance was solved by two breakthroughs, one
was reliable multi-level cell (more than 1 bit per cell) and the other was
device patterning small enough that you could mask endurance issues with
excess capacity. That took NAND flash out of USB key fobs and into HDD
replacements.

For graphene there are a couple of things to look for, one is the ability to
mass produce it in sheets. If you can reliably produce sheets of graphene you
can make a lot of interesting products. The second is doping/patterning. If
you can selectively apply changes to a sheet of graphene to create features
that act as transistors, then you start being able to build circuits into the
sheets you can produce.

This particular paper talks about essentially 2D features in graphene that
change the p-n junction path with properties that are similar to optical
lenses. That provides a different way of switching elements (as opposed to
charge manipulation) that means there are some new structures that should be
considered when building a graphene transistor.

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nirav72
Graphene has been touted as the miracle matarial for years now. But we're
still so far from practical applications.

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Phlarp
Graphene has practical (and currently deployed, although niche) applications
in the real world.

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rbanffy
I may be optimistic here, but this has all the features of something hugely
disruptive.

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yomly
It definitely seems like the wonder material of wonder materials, the main
struggle has been to mass produce/commercialise it. I believe manipulating it
is also non-trivial.

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skc
Been reading about the amazing properties of Graphene for years now, I'm
surprised nothing substantial has come of it all yet (or at least nothing I've
heard of)

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hossbeast
Why not just use photons, which more readily exhibit this behavior?

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DiabloD3
It's still hard to produce photonic circuitry at the complexity we need for
CPUs and such.

Graphine and nano carbon and carbyne and whatnot? Could be what we need to
produce a post-5nm IC fabrication technology for manufacturers.

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andrewflnr
Well, yeah, but it's still hard to produce graphene circuitry at the
complexity we need for CPUs and such, too. Are photonics actually harder?

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DiabloD3
A bit harder, yes.

