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Graphene shows strange new behavior better suited for electronic devices.

Regarded as a possible replacement for silicon-based semiconductors, graphene, a sheet of pure carbon, has been discovered to have an uncommon and astonishing property that might make it better matched for future electronic devices.


This is a scanning tunneling microscope image of a single layer of graphene on platinum with four nanobubbles at the graphene-platinum border and one in the patch interior. The inset shows a high-resolution image of a graphene nanobubble and its distorted honeycomb lattice due to strain in the bubble. Credit: Crommie lab, UC Berkeley


In this scanning tunneling microscopy image of a graphene nanobubble, the hexagonal two-dimensional graphene crystal is seen distorted and stretched along three main axes. The strain creates pseudo-magnetic fields far stronger than any magnetic field ever produced in the laboratory Credit: courtesy of Micheal Crommie, Berkeley Lab

-- Tom