
Crystal growers who sparked a revolution in graphene electronics - sohkamyung
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02472-0
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ChuckMcM
I enjoy those sorts of stories, people doing research into something they find
interesting opening up a field for others.

If this material (hBN) could be made industrially at scale I believe it would
completely change the capacitor market. Based on papers that describe the
amount of charge (current) graphene can carry, especially when isolated with
hBN, I imagine that a capacitor made with an hBN dielectric would completely
blow away its closest competitor both in capacitance per cubic mm and in low
ESR. Think dots the size of periods replacing components that are now the size
of rice grains.

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ksec
>Think dots the size of periods replacing components that are now the size of
rice grains.

That is possibly 100x difference in size? So if this was 1000x the cost per
cubic mm, it would only be 10x more expensive per unit of same Capacitance.

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ChuckMcM
That would be one way to look at it, or 100x the amount of capacitance in the
same volume. In the radio stuff I'm currently doing there are challenges with
volume required by the current capacitor technology.

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sohkamyung
OT. From the article:

> Taniguchi is known for his parties, blasts the music of Queen through the
> lab as he runs the press late at night

I wonder if "Under Pressure" gets a lot of play when the press is in
operation. :-)

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fnord77
Great story. OT for the main point of the story, but I found this interesting:

> hBN for the cosmetics industry; some eyeliners are up to 25% boron nitride.

why?

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bsder
Lubricity, apparently. It apparently makes things powdery, but slightly
"greasy"\--much like graphite.

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westurner
> _This seven-metre-tall machine can squeeze carbon into diamonds_

OT but, is this a thing now? Diamonds can be entangled.

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inamberclad
Don't know what you mean by entangled. They mention forming diamonds using the
heat and pressure of the press, which is a well known technique to alter the
crystal lattice between carbon atoms.

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westurner
Does it take more energy than mining for diamonds?

> _Quantum Entanglement Links 2 Diamonds: Usually a finicky phenomenon limited
> to tiny, ultracold objects, entanglement has now been achieved for
> macroscopic diamonds at room temperature_ (2011)
> [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/room-
> temperature-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/room-
> temperature-entanglement/)

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inamberclad
It takes less human suffering.

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pwonp
It's not much of a revolution if it hasn't put graphene electronics into
practical use. Measure any metric you want, but if it's all in the research
and development sphere, it's not a revolution.

Call it "intense interest" if you want to highlight an event, but "revolution"
isn't the word.

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asharpe1
Comments like this are short sighted. These discoveries have been some of the
biggest in condensed matter physics in the last decade and very well could
lead to a Nobel prize. The amount of research that has been enabled by the hBN
of Watanabe and Taniguchi has been truly unprecedented. Their hBN helped lead
to graphene devices with drastically increased electron mobilities, allowing
for this resurgence of graphene and other 2D materials. It is not always just
about immediate practical applications. Graphene may not ever make it into
practical use, but it has been one of the most important systems for studying
transport phenomena and may lead to important applications in the future.

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redis_mlc
Whoosh! pwonp was saying that it's all about him, like similar posts.

