
Graphene: Fast, Strong, Cheap, and Impossible to Use - ezhil
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/22/material-question
======
themartorana
I have no doubt that graphene will change the world, but as the article
mentions, it may take a long time to get there.

The thing that bothered me the most was the mention of the patent race.
Everything was "patent patent patent" \- which means instead of a discovery in
lab A spurring a totally new way of thinking in lab B, it restricts lab B from
ever thinking that way.

Without the race to patent every single minuscule discovery about graphene and
its properties, advancing early discoveries could move at an exponentially
faster pace. Don't grab the ball and run with it - grab it and keep it to
yourself.

I know all the arguments for patents, but I can't shake the feeling that they
do nothing but stifle innovation and discovery by locking up research just
when it gets interesting.

(When the measure of success is how many patents are filed, not how many
discoveries are made... or how you just beat the Chinese to _filing a patent_
, I'm just a tad less hopeful.)

~~~
swamp40
If you think provisional patents are stifling innovation, you should see what
happens when you tell these researchers that they no longer have the
possibility of getting incredibly filthy rich someday from their discoveries -
because all patents have been eliminated and a new era of _" share and share
alike for the common good"_ is upon us.

~~~
hyperbovine
Nobody I know in research is in it for the money. There are much, much more
direct ways for technically gifted people to get rich--look up "quantitative
finance".

------
scott_s
Forgive me for derailing a technical thread, but I want to comment on the
author's description of the building I work in:

 _A vast arc of glass with an upswept front awning, it is a kind of monument
to the difficulty of predicting the future. Saarinen imagined that
transformative ideas would emerge from groups of scientists working in meeting
areas, where recliners and coffee tables still sit beside soaring windows.
Instead, the scientists spend much of the day hunched over computer screens in
their offices: small, windowless dens, which seem to have been created as an
afterthought._

I don't think he gives it enough credit. Saarinen actually had an egalitarian
notion: _no one_ gets a window office, because the shared hallway is one giant
window. You can see what I mean in this shot:
[http://www.research.ibm.com/people/a/alpert/watson_night.jpg](http://www.research.ibm.com/people/a/alpert/watson_night.jpg)

The building is long, not high. The two main hallways that go the length of
the building (the inner and outer parts of a semicircle; aerial shot here:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/IBM...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/IBM_Yorktown.jpg/200px-
IBM_Yorktown.jpg)) are floor-to-ceiling window. The spokes that actually have
offices are short hallways between these two long, main hallways.

I like this building. I get to see the outside world as I walk around the
building - not in glimpses, but in full. During the day, there is a lot of
natural light coming from the large hallway windows. More than other office
buildings I've been in, I have a constant sense of where I am, physically,
with respect to the outside world. I like the notion that everyone - even the
executives - get the same kind of office. (Some are a little larger, but not
more than twice the size of a normal office.) And unlike cube-farms, we have
private offices with doors we can close.

~~~
jessriedel
Got to disagree with you on this one Scott :) It's a simple matter of light-
hours. Folks spend a lot more time in their office than walking between them.
The light streaming in through those big beautiful windows is wasted on a
mostly empty hallway!

~~~
scott_s
I'm comparing it to Hawthorne, where most people had interior offices _and_
the building had completely interior hallways. I was one of those who had a
completely interior office, and it sucked.

If you give some offices windows, then you must take those window spaces away
from other public and private spaces.

~~~
vacri
Or you can use light wells.

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tempestn
I enjoyed this little jab: "It was twice rejected by Nature, where one reader
stated that isolating a stable, two-dimensional material was “impossible,” and
another said that it was not “a sufficient scientific advance.”"

It's completely impossible, but if you did manage to do it, meh.

~~~
pja
That's peer review in a nutshell for you :)

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Xcelerate
I have a question for someone on here. When I began research in grad school in
2012, graphene had already been discovered eight years previously. I
understand that before this happened, a "2D" atomic layer of a material had
never been isolated.

What I want to know is: why was this considered impossible before then? I do
molecular dynamics simulations (and am in fact performing simulations on
graphene currently), and an individual layer of graphene easily stays intact
in both a vacuum and other environments. The capability to simulate one layer
of graphene was also available way before 2004.

So what was it that made single-layer isolation so astonishing at the time? It
seems like it would have been a perfectly reasonable assumption to me (but
like I said, I suppose I'm biased by the benefit of hindsight).

~~~
Osmium
> I do molecular dynamics simulations (and am in fact performing simulations
> on graphene currently), and an individual layer of graphene easily stays
> intact in both a vacuum and other environments.

You can make a lot of 'stable' things in molecular dynamics simulations that
don't exist in reality ;) You could construct any number of 2D materials that
exist quite happily because they're close to some local minima or other, or
because of some quirk of the potential forcefields you use. So I don't think
"I can make it exist in a computer" is necessarily a good reason for expecting
it to exist in reality, even if in the case of graphene it's relatively
straight forward. Though useful, classical molecular dynamics is also quite
dumb: it's really good for simulating known materials, but not so much for
discovering new ones.

As for "2D" materials generally...well, we can make monolayers of a lot of
things, sandwiched between other materials. And we can make other things that
act like they're 2D even if they're not. There's nothing spectacular about it
per se. The difficulty, as with all these materials, is that predicting that
something has useful properties and actually being able to manufacture it at
scale and relatively defect free is _huge_. You're fighting entropy,
basically. So I think the surprise was not that graphene could exist in
principle, but that it could be made reliably.

~~~
Xcelerate
> You could construct any number of 2D materials that exist quite happily
> because they're close to some local minima or other, or because of some
> quirk of the potential forcefields you use ... though useful, classical
> molecular dynamics is also quite dumb

I believe you're thinking of the state of simulation in the 1980s. There's
been quite a bit of progress since then ;)

For my work, I'm using a new reactive forcefield that's based off of DFT
calculations and has a very close energetic match with experiment. Another
forcefield I have used is optimized for structure and almost exactly
reproduced neutron spectra for a variety of hierarchical materials, including
long-range order (and that was from model systems alone).

Also, QM-MM methods have recently become more popular with additional
computational power, so the parts that have significant non-classical effects
can be computed correctly without wasting computational power on the parts
that aren't going to make a difference.

As with any tool, molecular dynamics works very well if you know the theory
behind it and know what you can and can't use it for. Structural carbon
simulations is one of the areas where a lot of good forcefields exist (AIREBO
for instance).

------
swish41
Great article. IMO, CVD is the most promising scalable, manufacturing method,
but the following advances have to happen:

\- Able to grow Graphene of arbitrary thickness on a wide variety of surfaces
\- Achieving CVD at low temperature \- Control of grain size, ripples, doping
level, and number of layers \- Coming up with a cost-effective way to handle
to the Transfer step, or eliminating it entirely

As the current market for graphene applications is driven by the production of
this material, there is a clear hierarchy in how soon the applications will
reach the user or consumer. Those that use the lowest- grade, cheapest and
most available material will be the first to appear, probably in a few years,
and those which require the highest, electronic- quality grades or
biocompatibility may well take decades to develop.Also, because developments
in the last few years were extremely rapid,graphene’s prospects continue to
improve.

~~~
bsder
I'm surprised that they seem to be concentrating so little on CVD.

Yes, CVD is expensive, but it's not rocket science anymore. We can do all
manner of things to pizza-sized wafers of silicon in CVD. Shining lasers just
above the surface to heat the gas but not the substrate is one of the easiest
ones.

It feels like the labs are all chasing patents rather than actually doing
research.

------
serve_yay
Shoutout to the journal that rejected the research team's findings, once for
being impossible, then once for being mundane.

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enknamel
I like the sentiment of "Friday Experiments". That's exactly in line with how
we have hackathons and hackdays. They have also led to very interesting
innovations.

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tempestn
The title doesn't seem remotely accurate given the content of the article.
Graphene is _already_ being used in several applications, with many thousands
more being researched, a number of which were highlighted in the article. As
it also discusses, it takes quite a long time for any new material to really
become fully utilized; that certainly doesn't equate to "Impossible to Use".

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trhway
Tells a lot about current human civilization:

"The technology for the Fukushima-reactor cleanup stalled when scientists in
Japan couldn’t get the powder to work, and the postdoc who developed the
method was unable to get a visa to go assist them. "

------
ash
The original Graphene paper:

"The reported graphene films were made by mechanical exfoliation (repeated
peeling) of small mesas of highly-oriented pyrolytic graphite as described in
the supporting online material. This approach was found to be highly reliable
and allowed us to prepare FLG films up to 10 μm in size. Thicker films (d ≥
3nm) were up to a hundred microns across and visible by the naked eye."

Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films (Science, 2004)

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0410550.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-
mat/0410550.pdf)

------
edwinespinosa09
What I took most from this is that the continual battle of whether graphene
will indeed be important as a semiconductor rages on. I remember back in the
day when I first heard about it I wanted to hop in and invest like Texas
instrument with silicon. I guess at this point it's a guessing game.

------
mrfusion
Are there any other materials in the past that have taken this long to get
from the lab to mass production?

~~~
quote
Have you read the article?

"Aluminum, discovered in minute quantities in a lab in the eighteen-twenties,
was hailed as a wonder substance, with qualities never before seen in a metal:
it was lightweight, shiny, resistant to rust, and highly conductive. It could
be derived from clay (at first, it was called “silver from clay”), and the
idea that a valuable substance was produced from a common one lent it a
quality of alchemy. In the eighteen-fifties, a French chemist devised a method
for making a few grams at a time, and aluminum was quickly adopted for use in
expensive jewelry. Three decades later, a new process, using electricity,
allowed industrial production, and the price plummeted."

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morgante
Once again fooled by a headline which is equally applicable to the realtime
graphing framework...

~~~
Xcelerate
I believe you're thinking of "graphite". Although they should make a
lightweight version of their framework called "graphene" haha.

~~~
Xylakant
There's a project called "grapehene" which is a nicer ui for a graphite
backend.
[https://github.com/jondot/graphene](https://github.com/jondot/graphene)

