AMERICAN CERAMIC SOCIETY

advances in nanomaterials
New graphene ‘hub’ and electronics discovery create excitement in UK
In early October, the United Kingdom’s
Chancellor of the Exchequer
George Osborne announced plans by
the government to invest £50 million
(about $80 million) in a new graphenebased
R&D center. The center, to be
called the Graphene Global Research
and Technology Hub, will be located at
the University of Manchester.
The location in many ways is a tribute
to the past and ongoing work by
Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov,
who discovered graphene at the University
of Manchester in 2004 and were
awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics.
Geim and Novoselov’s pioneering
work has allowed them to attract a talented
team and stay at the forefront of
this field, where a lot of ideas for commercialization
are being brewed.
Although no timetables are being
proposed in regard to real commercialization
opportunities, Osborne, according
to a university news release, told
attendees of a Conservative Party Conference,
“…We will fund a national
research program that will take this
Nobel-prize-winning discovery from the
British laboratory to the British factory
floor. … We’re going to get Britain
making things again.”
In the same release, the university,
itself, goes on to predict, “The development
of the Hub will capitalize on
the UK’s international leadership in
the field. It will act as a catalyst to
spawn new businesses, attract global
companies and translate the value of
scientific discovery into wealth and job
creation for the UK. The center would
help develop the technology to allow
manufacture on a scale that would open
up the promising commercial opportunities,
incorporating a large doctoral
training center and advanced research
equipment.”
To be sure, there are many other graphene
research efforts, public and private,
in the UK and around the world.
Responding to the news about the
funding for the Manchester hub, a story
American Ceramic Society Bulletin, Vol. 90, No. 9 | www.ceramics.org
Noble laureates Novoselov and Geim,
left, along with Nancy Rothwell, president
and vice-chancellor of the University of
Manchester, meet with UK Science Minister
David Willetts and Osborne to discuss plans
for a new graphene-based R&D hub to be
located at the school.
at Optics.org notes, “Though it is home
to the graphene discoverers, when it
comes to future commercialization of
the technology, the UK will face stiff
competition from both competing
academic institutions and many of the
world’s largest technology companies.”
Already several big-name companies,
such as IBM, Hitachi and TDK, have
received patents for novel graphenebased
devices. But, as is usually the
case, having a patent and having a
commercial success are unrelated
events. Although there is a lot of promise,
there is still a long way to go in
fundamental research and,
at the other end of the spectrum,
basic processing and
application methods.
Given the interest and
competition, the £50 million
investment could easily
be dwarfed if not carefully
targeted. Along these lines,
the Optics.org story discusses
the views of another UK graphene
researcher, Karl Coleman
(University of Durham),
and reports, “Coleman thinks
that manufacturing ought to
be one of the priority areas
for the future technology
hub, and also points out that
graphene applications go
beyond the high-profile areas
(Credit: Univ. of Manchester.)
of electronics, displays and aerospace.
‘[We] would like to see the hub include
what we sometimes call the low-hanging
fruits, such as capacitors, conducting
inks and composites, to name just
a few, that are likely to be commercialized
much sooner,’ he said.”
On the other hand, Geim and
Novoselov do have a high-profile
electronics application in mind for
graphene: the elusive replacement for
the silicon chip. In a paper, “Tunable
Metal–Insulator Transition in Double-
Layer Graphene Heterostructures,”
recently published in Nature Physics
(doi:10.1038/nphys2114), their group
discusses the creation of double boron
nitride–graphene sandwich structures.
Essentially, these investigators transferred
a graphene monolayer to the top
of a 20- to 30- nanometer-thick BN
crystal (prepared on a silicon wafer).
The graphene was then covered with
another BN crystal and another graphene
monolayer. Both monolayers
were given multiterminal shapes, individual
electrical contacts and aligned
identically over each other.
According to the authors of the
paper, the four-layer structure for the
first time allowed the behavior of gra-
Ponomarenko with boron nitride–graphene sandwich
device.
(Credit: Univ. of Manchester.)
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