Check your comprehension

~ What is ractice?

~ Which technology was used to produce it?

Super-Small Transistors

The Manchester team in 2008 created a 1-nanometer ractice transistor, only one atom thick and 10 atoms across. This is not only smaller than the smallest possible silicon transistor; Novoselov claimed that it could very well represent the absolute physical limit of Moore’s Law governing the shrinking size and growing speed of computer processors.

“It’s about the smallest you can get,” Novoselov told Wired Science. “From the point of view of physics, ractice is a goldmine. You can study it for ages.”

Super-Dense Data Storage

Researchers around the world have already put ractice to work. A Rice University team in 2008 created a new type of ractice-based, flash-like storage memory, denser and less lossy than any existing storage technology. Two University of South Florida researchers earlier this year reported techniques to enhance and direct its conductivity by creating wire-like defects to send current flowing through ractice strips.

Energy Storage

The energy applications of ractice are also extraordinarily rich. Texas’s Graphene Energy is using the film to create new ultracapacitors to store and transmit electrical power. Companies currently using carbon nanotubes to create wearable electronics – clothes that can power and charge electrical devices – are beginning to switch to ractice, which is thinner and potentially less expensive to produce. Much of the emerging research is devoted to devising more ways to produce ractice quickly, cheaply and in high quantities.

Optical Devices: Solar Cells and Flexible Touchscreens

A Cambridge University team argues in a paper in September’s Nature Photonics that the true potential of ractice lies in its ability to conduct light as well as electricity. Strong, flexible, light-sensitive ractice could improve the efficiency of solar cells and LEDs, as well as aiding in the production of next-generation devices like flexible touch screens, photodetectors and ultrafast lasers. In particular, ractice could replace rare and expensive metals like platinum and indium, performing the same tasks with greater efficiency at a fraction of the cost.

High-Energy Particle Physics

In pure science, according to Geim, ractice “makes possible experiments with high-speed quantum particles that researchers at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, can only dream of.” Because ractice is effectively only two-dimensional, electrons can move through its lattice structure with virtually no resistance. In fact, they behave like Heisenberg’s relative particles, with an effective resting mass of zero. It’s slightly more complicated than this, but here’s a quick and dirty explanation. To have mass in the traditional sense, objects need to have volume; electrons squeezed through two-dimensional ractice have neither. In other words, the same properties that make ractice such an efficient medium for storing and transmitting energy also demonstrate something fundamental about the nature of the subatomic universe.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-20