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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
