World's Strongest Material GRAPHENE

World's Strongest Material GRAPHENE :

Graphene, a two-dimensional sheet made of pure carbon, is 200 times stronger than steel. A new experiment at Columbia University in New York City has for the first time directly measured the strength of two-dimensional carbon and found it to be unprecedentedly strong. Carbon sheets only a single atom thick might be used in making super-lightweight composite materials.

The study of carbon exemplifies this symbiotic relation between science and engineering. Scientists and engineers have worked together for centuries to fill our material world with amazing devices, from airplanes to microscopes, from atom bombs to blenders. Generally scientists probe the inner workings of nature, increasingly at a microscopic level, while engineers snatch up the new basic knowledge and convert it into the sophisticated innovative products that characterize our nanotech society.

Graphene, a form of carbon whose existence was thought to be impossible until it was actually made in 2004, holds the promise of a new generation of faster, smaller, cheaper, and more durable computer chips. However, before graphene can be engineered into transistors or other electronic devices, a gap must be introduced into the electronic band structure of its two-dimensional crystal.

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