Bhubaneswar, Dec. 17: Dubbed as the ‘wonder material’, Graphene has emerged as the potential replacement for Silicon promising to revolutionize application in electronics, an eminent researcher said on Friday.
“It is a highly stretchable, transparent and impermeable material which has been found to be useful in various devices required in daily use,” Prof. Sekhar Chandra Ray of the Department of Physics of University of South Africa, Johanesburg, said in a paper presented at the ongoing three-day international conference on Smart Materials and Applications being held at the SOA University since Thursday.
Graphene, he said, had been isolated from Graphite by two physicists, Andre Gem and Konstantin Novoselov, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 for the discovery.
Made of one-atom-thick planar sheet, Graphene is the thinnest, strongest, lightest and smallest material in the world, Prof. Ray said adding it had grabbed attention for its high mechanical strength, very high electron mobility and superior thermal conductivity.
“The world has evolved from the Stone age to the Bronze and then the Iron age. The present era is known for use of silicon material and can be described as the Silicon age. But scientists assume that the next age could be named as the Graphene age,” he said.
Graphene, Prof. Ray said, could be used to create electronic components which were transparent and flexible, creating a new paradigm in electronic product design. “This material is flexible and transparent and can lead to the creation of graphene-based electrodes,” he said adding it could contribute to new types of systems, circuits and devices where several functions could be combined into a single material.
