Making Graphene Nanomachines

Making Graphene Nanomachines
Graphene devices could make extremely sensitive sensors and superfast electronic switches for consumer electronics.
Many of today's consumer electronics rely on microscopic machines. These tiny devices are found in smart-phone motion sensors, inkjet printheads, and the switches that activate some display pixels, to name just a few components.
Shrinking these electromechanical machines down to the nanoscale would enable new devices, such as extremely sensitive chemical sensors, incredibly precise accelerometers, and super-fast integrated circuit switches. In an important step toward this goal, researchers at Cornell University have made large arrays of nanoscale resonators using graphene.
An atom-thin form of carbon called graphene is among the most promising materials for making nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS). Graphene is the strongest known material, and the most electrically conductive. Graphene's atom-thin size means it is also incredibly lightweight and can move very fast. Cornell physics professor Paul McEuen says graphene can be used to build large numbers of nanodevices with equipment developed for etching silicon chips on flat wafers.
"The two major obstacles in implementing nanodevices are scale-up and reproducibility in performance," says Alex Zettl, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Zettl has made similar devices from carbon nanotubes, including a radio made from a single carbon nanotube. "Using single-layer graphene allows many devices to be made in one shot, with similar performance," Zettl says.