Jiggling Graphene

Nearly 200 years after Robert Brown first documented the animated, wiggling motion of particles suspended in water, physicists are still uncovering secrets of Brownian motion. Paul Thibado from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and colleagues have observed that freestanding graphene membranes quiver continuously up and down, much like Brown’s particles, but with intermittent interruptions when the jiggling causes the curvature of the membrane at small scales to flip. These room-temperature flips could be utilized to harvest energy to power nanomachines.