They're the building block of graphite – ultra-thin sheets of carbon, just one atom thick, whose discovery was lauded in 2010 with a Nobel Prize in Physics.
The seemingly simple material is graphene, and many researchers believe it has great potential for many applications, from electronic devices to high-performance composite materials.
Graphene is extremely strong, an excellent conductor, and with no internal structure at all, it offers an abundance of surface area – much like a sheet of paper.
When it comes to producing and utilizing graphene on a large scale, however, researchers have come upon a major problem: the material's tendency to aggregate. Like paper, graphene sheets easily stack into piles, thus greatly reducing their surface area and making them unprocessable.
Researchers at Northwestern University have now developed a new form of graphene that does not stack. The new material – inspired by a trash can full of crumpled-up papers – is made by crumpling the graphene sheets into balls.
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