
How ‘Magic Angle’ Graphene Is Stirring Up Physics - toufiqbarhamov
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07848-2
======
e98cuenc
I'm a long time friend with Pablo, the main researcher behind this discovery,
since our time together at the university.

Every time this pops up there is some comment dismissing the discovery as yet
another graphene theoretical breakthrough with no practical application. This
discovery can help us better understand superconductivity at high
temperatures, and that along will qualify it as a major discovery. It can also
be super important in practice if we manage to bring graphene out of the lab.

Not everything hits mass market in a 5 years timeframe... in the short term it
may seem we have a slow rate of adoption of new technologies, but if you take
a step back you can see the rate is fabulous. Graphene, batteries, solar cells
and before them, transistors, nuclear power, etc. may take a while to hit the
market, when they hit it they hit it hard.

~~~
leoc
> Not everything hits mass market in a 5 years timeframe... in the short term
> it may seem we have a slow rate of adoption of new technologies, but if you
> take a step back you can see the rate is fabulous. Graphene, batteries,
> solar cells and before them, transistors, nuclear power, etc. may take a
> while to hit the market, when they hit it they hit it hard.

Most of those older comparisons still aren't flattering to graphene. We're
nearly 15 years away from Geim and Novoselov's Sellotape trick now. 14 years
after the first working laser in 1960 (though the first maser was in '53 and
apparently the first paper was '51) the first supermarket barcode scanner was
in operation, while Xerox PARC already had a working laser printer system. The
first transistor was late 1947: the first consumer transistor radio was 1954
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regency_TR-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regency_TR-1)
, and the US military had been using transistors well before that. Calder Hill
nuclear power station (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield)
) opened in 1956, about 14 years after the Manhattan Project and Chicago
Pile-1.

~~~
e98cuenc
We already have some graphene applications in the market. We may not get a
graphene rope, just like we don't have a nuclear boosted car, but that doesn't
mean there are not practical applications in the market and others expected to
hit the market in a few years.

~~~
zamadatix
Your first comment says not everything hits the market in a 5 year timeframe
and now you say we already have graphene applications on the market. What are
these applications and why don't they count against your opening comment?

~~~
e98cuenc
Because they're still small applications and not what everyone is looking for.
Just like other technologies first got to the market in some small niche
applications, and it took decades to fully realize their potential.

------
sushisource
"Twistronics" has to be the coolest name I've seen in a while

------
jgrowl
I wonder what happens if you stack more than two layers, adjusting by 1 degree
with each layer.

~~~
sytse
This is mentioned in the article, with three payers you don't even need to
rotate: "Meanwhile, Feng Wang at the University of California, Berkeley, says
he and his colleagues have seen signs of superconductivity in triple-stacked
layers of graphene even without a twist. Layering three sheets in a particular
orientation8 achieves a superlattice geometry similar to that in magic-angle
twisted bilayers, and results in similarly strongly correlated physics, he
says."

------
baldfat
I still am waiting for Graphene to deliver a tenth of what was foretasted.
Graphene has good company with Fuel Cells and every single new battery
technology over the past 20 years.

~~~
toufiqbarhamov
Graphene has a big advantage over them, although it is slow to deliver. New
batteries or affordable fuel cells require breakthroughs in materials science,
especially in the case of fuel cells. Inventing novel, cheap, mass-produceable
catalysts to replace something like platinum, or a novel battery chemistry is
a monumental challenge. Graphene already exists, but the propeties of the
material are complex, and affordable mass production at the desirable scale is
prohibitively expensive. Still, it exists, it can be made and manipulated, but
a lot of exploration into its properties remains.

I’d expect Graphene to be useful with a couple of decades, possibly sooner,
while I wouldn’t even venture a guess on breakthrough batteries or fuel cells.

~~~
joe_the_user
It seems like graphene production at scale is something states should be
putting money and resources into. It's the kind of thing much more amenable to
a "new Manhattan Project" than something like AI.

~~~
ajuc
> It seems like graphene production at scale is something states should be
> putting money and resources into.

They do.

[https://polska.pl/science/achievements-science/graphene-
prod...](https://polska.pl/science/achievements-science/graphene-production-
kicks-poland/)

They created a company that does it, and you can buy graphene from them.

[https://www.graphene-info.com/nano-carbon](https://www.graphene-
info.com/nano-carbon)

Turns out there are lots of different kinds of graphene, and despite all the
hype - the demand for the kind we can produce at the current prices - just
isn't that big.

~~~
joe_the_user
_Turns out there are lots of different kinds of graphene, and despite all the
hype - the demand for the kind we can produce at the current prices - just isn
't that big._

As I recall, this is because what can be produced at scale today is, to speak,
crap. Authentic, reasonably pure, graphene has all sorts of amazing properties
when created in labs but you have these companies producing more or less junk
that doesn't get any larger-scale production going. In ways, "starting a
company" to produce graphene now has been the source of a lot of the problem.
Scientists attempting to apply graphene results wind-up buying junk graphene
and failing.

The point of large scale state investment over time, not dependent on
immediately making money, is to get beyond these problems. There's the risk
that even a lot of spending won't get you a way of producing good graphene at
scale - well that's the risk. State finance is all about being the way such
large-scale risk can be taken.

~~~
cosmie
This. There was a paper published recently[1], and a writeup in Nature[2]
about it, which tested 60 different suppliers of graphene and found virtually
all of them were junk and didn't match the ISO definition of graphene (i.e. 10
or fewer layers of atoms).

[1]
[https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.201803784](https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.201803784)

[2]
[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06939-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06939-4)

~~~
ajuc
This is a study about graphene produced by liquid‐phase exfoliation.

The company I linked produces graphene of supposedly better quality by
chemical vapour deposition. It apparently still isn't the kind we want
(because otherwise they would be much more famous and rich).

