It may be true that seeing is believing, but sometimes hearing can be better.
Case in point: Two brothers in a Rice University laboratory heard something unusual while making graphene. Ultimately, they determined the sound itself could give them valuable data about the product.
The brothers, John Li, a Rice alumnus now studying at Stanford University, and Victor Li, then a high school student in New York and now a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are co-lead authors of a paper that describes the real-time analysis of laser-induced graphene (LIG) production through sound.
The brothers were working in the lab of Rice chemist James Tour when they came up with their hypothesis and presented it at a group meeting.
"Professor Tour said, "It is interesting," and told us to pursue it as a potential project," John Li recalled.
The results, which appear in Advanced Functional Materials, describe a simple acoustic signal processing scheme that analyzes LIG in real time to determine its form and quality.
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