Graphene can withstand 1000 times the current intensity

If you think grapheme is not impressive and 2016 is no longer surprising, graphene has come and knocked on the door of discovery later this year.

A new study has shown that graphene is much more resistant to what we previously predicted - and in a different way than ordinary matter - making it a perfect material for fabrication of super-fast electronic devices of the next generation.

"The current intensity that it can transmit is about 1000 times higher than what leads to the destruction of materials below normal" , Elisabeth Gruber from the Institute of Applied Physics at TU Wien in Austria.

"Over time and space, graphene can withstand such maximum currents without being affected".

In order not to misunderstand, what we are talking about here is not how efficiently graphene can conduct electricity. Earlier this year, scientists tried to turn this material into a superconductor, capable of being an electron shuttle without resistance.

Graphene is much more resistant to what we previously predicted.

That time is too much and enough for graphene to keep the title "so miraculous" for another year.

The latest study does not focus on the effect of electron transfer, but only focuses on how much this material can withstand a large current - especially, how many electrons it has. Can carry in a short time.

And the results are impressive.

In case you need to "review" a little bit about graphene, it is a honeycomb-shaped array of carbon atoms, and graphite is due to many graphene sheets put together. It is harder than steel and diamond but very flexible, it has been found to be able to withstand high charge density.

To find out, the researchers blew positively charged i-on xenon into a graphene sheet, causing a large number of electrons to be fired from the graphene plate where they were hit.

Imagine the i-on xenon blowing away the electrons of the graphene plate like you throw a tenis ball on the clay ground.

An i-on xenon can steal more than 20 electrons from a small area on the graphene sheet, which may not sound like much, but seeing every carbon atom has only 6 electrons to start with, that is actually A big problem with the stability of matter.

As a result, there are many positive charges around carbon atoms.

I-on xenon also pushes the graphene's entire carbon atom when it passes through, but this has a much smaller effect than losing electrons.

In a normal material, electrons will quickly try to correct this imbalance, but it does not happen fast enough, so that matter will begin to be destroyed.

"What you expect to happen next is that positively charged i-on carbon will push each other out of the graphene plate in an explosion called Coulomb and leave a big gap in matter , " Richard Wilhelm, a member of the research team, said.

"But surprisingly, this case has not happened. Positive charges in graphene are almost immediately disabled."

Graphene sheet.

So graphene somehow has the ability to fill its electron holes with other electrons almost immediately, meaning that it has transferred large amounts of charge in a short period of time.

And when scientists say that in a short period of time, it means that it is very short - new electrons are introduced in only a few femtoseconds (one thousandth of a second).

"The electronic reaction of matter to compensate for the interruption caused by the i-on xenon is extremely fast," Gruber said.

"The strong current from the neighborhoods of the graphene sheet was timely fed up with the missing electrons before the explosion occurred due to the same sign of electrical charge."

The electric current intensity that the graphene sheet can transmit to make this about 1000 times higher than any conventional material can withstand.

Further research will need to understand exactly how this happened, but this is also an incredible news for engineers who want to make super-fast electronics in the future, because Graphene can become a material that has enough strength to handle such high-intensity electrons.