If you had never heard of "graphene" before, you might know something about it now if you've followed the 2010 Nobel Prize announcements. Two physicists at the University of Manchester (UK) were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene," carbon flakes that are only as thick as a single atom yet as strong as steel and as conductive as copper. But, what happens next for this revolutionary nanoscale material? Two social scientists began a study earlier in 2010 to understand the as yet undeveloped pathway to the commercialization of graphene the processes, plans, promises and perils. Team leaders with the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (CNS-ASU), Jan Youtie at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and Philip Shapira at the University of Manchester and Georgia Tech are in the throes of their project on the Comparative Research and Innovation Approaches of Graphene Centers.
Graphene is anticipated to have potential applications in electronics to build semiconductors beyond the limits of silicon-based technology. It also offers promising applications for higher performance solar cells, LCD screens and photon sensors. Now that graphene has been identified and found to be stable in ultra-thin sheets, research efforts to understand it more thoroughly and to produce it in large quantities have ballooned. Yet, graphene is still at the development stage, and its commercialization pathway remains to be determined.
To kick-off their work on graphene innovation, Youtie and Shapira have been undertaking field work in two of the world's leading centers for graphene development: the University of Manchester and Georgia Tech. As acknowledged by the Nobel Committee for Physics when it awarded its 2010 Prize to Manchester physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, Manchester is the site of seminal work on graphene, including the first
|Contact: Cathy Arnold|
Arizona State University