| Every age in the history of human civilisation has a signature material, from the Stone Age, to the Bronze and Iron Ages. We might even call today’s information-driven society the Silicon Age. | |
| Since the 1960s, silicon nanostructures, the building-blocks of microchips, have supercharged the development of electronics, communications, manufacturing, medicine, and more. | |
| How small are these nanostructures? Very, very small – you could fit at least 3,000 silicon transistors onto the tip of a human hair. But there is a limit: below about 5 nanometres (5 millionths of a millimetre), it is hard to improve the performance of silicon devices any further. | |
| So if we are about to exhaust the potential of silicon nanomaterials, what will be our next signature material? That’s where “atomaterials” come in. | |
What are atomaterials? |
|
| “Atomaterials” is short for “atomic materials”, so called because their properties depend on the precise configuration of their atoms. It is a new but rapidly developing field. | |
| One example is graphene, which is made of carbon atoms. Unlike diamond, in which the carbon atoms form a rigid three-dimensional structure, graphene is made of single layer of carbon atoms, bonded together in a two-dimensional honeycomb lattice. | |
| Diamond’s rigid structure is the reason for its celebrated hardness and longevity, making it the perfect material for high-end drill bits and expensive jewellery. In contrast, the two-dimensional form of carbon atoms in graphene allows electron travelling frictionless at a high speed giving ultrahigh conductivity and the outstanding in plane mechanical strength. Thus, graphene has broad applications in medicines, electronics, energy storage, light processing, and water filtration. | |
| Using lasers, we can fashion these atomic structures into miniaturised devices with exceptional performance. |
Image Credit: Swinburne
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