By County Friedrich von Olsen
Just down the road in Pasadena, Caltech scientists have made what is potentially the breakthrough of the decade, or perhaps the century or even the millennium. They have created a sheet of graphene that measures one centimeter by one centimeter. What is so significant and important about a wafer thin piece of carbon that is less than .0656 square inches wide? It turns out that I did not need to go far to get an explanation of that, but merely mention the subject to the Sentinel’s publisher…
It turns out Mark Gutglueck has a passion for the subject of graphene and possible ways of manufacturing it. I will let him explain, first, what it is. “It is simple carbon,” Gutglueck said, “but different from almost every other form of carbon. Graphene is just one-atom thick. It occurs in nature, but only by chance and only in the most minute of quantities. It has extraordinary properties. Once formed it has unheard of resiliency. It is stronger than titanium. Compared to it steel would be like a fluffy down pillow. And it also is capable of conducting electricity exceedingly efficiently, far more efficiently and speedily than silicon, which the current generation of computers is based on. Computer chips or hard drives composed of graphene would have a storage capability hundreds of thousands of times greater than the computers in use today and would feature processing speeds magnitudes beyond our fastest processors. Not only that, graphene is light and compact. The miniaturization of computerized devises has already achieved impressive levels, in my mind. Graphene offers the possibility of miniaturization that is beyond comprehension.” Okay, so the stuff has possibilities…
I was a bit surprised to learn that the Sentinel publisher is a scientist. When I said as much, it provoked a hasty rebuke. “Look, I’m no scientist,” he said. “And I really don’t want to be put on the spot by some real scientist who will make me look like some kind of fool when he or she starts talking to me like I am one.” The best I could do was to get him to admit, “I have an understanding of scientific method. I have an interest in nanotechnology.” I picked up on the subject of graphene again. He said that up until the apparent breakthrough in Pasadena there has been all order of highly creative, sophisticated, disciplined and technologically advanced approaches to fabricating, or trying to fabricate, graphene. “A whole lot of clever and well thought-through methods have been tried,” Gutglueck said. “There are over 8,000 patents on ways to create it. The thing is, none of them really worked, or worked effectively in ways that could be consistently replicated. The most reliable way, up until now, of making it was pretty low tech and pretty chancy. What they would do is take a piece of tape, adhesive tape, and set it sticky side down in some carbon. Then they would lay the tape on a surface and press it down. When the tape was pulled up, it would leave a film of carbon on the surface. About one out of every 800 or 900 times that was done there would be patch of graphene left on the surface.” Pretty low tech…
That’s where Gutglueck’s interest in this came in. He was eager to try out a number of theories he had for a systematic and reliable method of manufacturing graphene. “My first approach was to do it electrostatically,” Gutglueck said. “The concept was to create an electric field that would envelope the carbon and to keep the field – a relatively low level field – flowing until the molecules distributed themselves evenly. The trick it seems to me is to ascertain what degree of voltage would work. It would have to be a very precise level, probably dependent upon the amount of carbon you are dealing with. I found out later that others were attempting something on the order of my idea. You can uniformly distribute carbon electrostatically, it turns out. But the problem, as I understand it, is that when you shut down the current, you get a ripple across the layer of carbon. I still think doing it electrostatically might work, but you would need to create a device to gradually, very gradually, excruciatingly gradually, lower the voltage down to zero.” So much for that approach…
Many of the other methods of creating graphene he contemplated were expensive and involved, requiring equipment that is hard to come by or is monopolized by others in the scientific community for experiments they are carrying out. A common approach requires heating the carbon to extremely high temperatures, in some cases approaching 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. “The application of heat and pressure is a standard approach when we are talking about building graphene,” Gutglueck said. “At the University of California at Riverside they have an oven with a chamber that can generate heat in excess of 1,600 degrees and in which you can increase the atmospheric pressure to a magnitude that will essentially flatten or compress commonplace items. I was interested in experimenting with those possibilities, utilizing different pressures and different levels of heat and different media as substrates. I was never able to do that because I don’t have a laboratory of my own and it is very difficult to get access to the equipment that does exist so you can carry out experimentation. There is a demand for the use of that equipment and a backlog of people, all of whom have legitimate experiments pending, who want to use the equipment.” He thus never personally utilized the heat and pressure approach…
He had a good dozen other ideas, some of which at least sound intriguing. “One approach I think might have viability,” he said, “is vibration. If we take a substrate and measure it precisely, we can calculate by weight how much carbon we would need to cover the substrate’s area to a depth of one atom of carbon.” What he means by a substrate is simply a flat plate. “What you would do is put that precise amount of carbon on the substrate and then enclose it with a border,” he went on. “By vibrating the substrate, my theory is you could get the carbon to distribute evenly over the surface. If you continued the vibration, and by vibration I mean a very minute but even oscillation, up and down, forward and backward, side to side, eventually you would get what I would label pre-graphene. You would then cease the vibration and allow the graphene to set. Assuming you didn’t tear any of the carbon away when you removed the border or separated the graphene from the substrate, I think you could create a sizeable sheet of graphene.” Another proposed method he came up with is a variation on the vibration approach delineated above, involving a substrate and a superstrate. A superstrate is a flat plate placed on top of the substrate. “If you measure out the precise amount of carbon you need on the substrate, you could then compress the carbon with the superstrate. You would slowly, very slowly, narrow the gap between the substrate and superstrate to the thickness of a single atom of carbon. If you did it right, at least according to my theory, you would then have graphene.” It’s anybody’s guess as to whether these methods would actually work…
I asked him what he knew or thought of the success achieved at Caltech. “What I know is the fellow who came up with this method of construction is named David Boyd, who somehow introduced methane into the derivative process. This new technique allows for the graphene to form at a relatively cool temperature, something around 850 degrees, which is considerably lower than what a lot of people were accustomed to thinking of as necessary before. I’m impressed. I’d like to talk to Mr. Boyd. I had considered the use of gasses in the process might be the key. I hadn’t considered methane specifically, but it occurred to me that if you experimented around with all kinds of gases, oxygen, fluorine, krypton, argon, nitrogen, the whole range of organic gases, and inorganic gases, helium, etcetera, you could potentially create a medium in which graphene would form, either spontaneously or with prompting. I had this intuitive feeling, which was not really based on anything empirical, that this could be done without having to use extreme temperatures. Something I heard is they now think constructing graphene at room temperature is likely. My sense of it all along was there is probably more than one technique that will work. When you look at all of the possibilities and consider that you have to catalogue through them by trial and error until you achieve success, it is pretty daunting. The perfect marriage of conditions and method is out there somewhere, but what is it? Where is it? I’m convinced that sometimes being unconventional or creative or lucky or inspired works better than endless repetitive experimentation. I also think that proves I’m not a scientist.” Who am I to contradict the boss?