graphene dreams

Jen-Luc Piquant and I are reporting live for the next few days from nearby Baltimore, where the American Physical Society is holding its 2006 March Meeting. It's the largest US physics meeting of the year, covering the broadest range of research areas, and always features some Very Important Physics (VIP) breakthroughs that invariably end up transforming technology within a decade or two of the initial papers on a given research area. Yet for some reason, it never garners much mainstream media coverage, although it is well-attended by the cornerstones of the science press (New Scientist, Nature, Science, and the like).

Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance posted a tongue-in-cheek comment on this blog recently (see post here), claiming that the APS April meeting -- which will be held next month in Dallas -- is much cooler, in terms of generating "buzz," than the March conference, perhaps because it deals with things like astrophysics, black holes, string theory, particle physics, and other high "Wow" factor subjects that have proven to be perennial favorites with the public. Carbon nanotubes, Bose-Einstein condensates, spintronics, terahertz sensing and imaging, and the quest for a quantum superfluid always pale a bit in comparison. They're a much tougher sell. Plus, the April meeting always seems to have more "mediagenic" physicists on hand: attractive, personable, and very adept at talking about their research in an accessible fashion.

Sean is an April meeting kind of guy, and is understandably biased. But sitting forlornly at the first press conference of the day, I had to admit: Sean has a point.

The topic was the prospective use of two-dimensional carbon sheets, known as graphene, for the next generation of computer microchips. In this world of faster, smaller, cheaper electronics, it should have have generated a lot of buzz. After all, until last fall, most theorists assumed that graphene sheets couldn't exist. They are normally rolled up into 3D buckyballs, or 1D carbon nanotubes; researchers have now succeeded in isolating them for the first time, making graphene one of the hottest areas of materials research. I won't go into the technical details; you can find the Georgia Tech press release here, and I guarantee you'll be reading about it in the science trade press in the coming months. Suffice to say, graphene is Very Important Physics, and -- with the latest papers still under embargo at Nature -- about as cutting-edge as the field can get.

The response of the mainstream press was an indifferent yawn, and small wonder: if any non-science reporter had accidentally stumbled into the graphene press conference, he or she would have run screaming for the exit within five minutes. I've been covering related topics at the March meeting for years, yet I only had the vaguest sense of what the first two speakers were talking about. I dutifully scribbled down random notes about the quantum Hall effect, the Klein paradox, Berry's phase, the Aharanov-Bohm effect, fine structure constants, and the potential to use graphene to build superconducting field-effect transistors. And I sighed inwardly in resignation, knowing I'd have to do a lot of extra legwork afterward to translate everything into straightforward English and find a catchy news hook. (Jen-Luc Piquant bailed altogether and relaxed with a soy latte and the latest New Yorker at her local Cyber-Starbucks while I suffered.)

Thank god for Walt de Heer, a "mediagenic" physics professor at Georgia Tech, who understands that when it comes to communicating science to the public, you have to tell a compelling story. A physicist friend of mine once memorably moaned, "It's hard to tell a good story when your main character is momentum!" It's even harder when your main character is an exotic form of carbon with bizarre electronic properties, whose "super powers" rely on tiny quantum effects that hardly anyone outside the physics community understands. One way to address this problem is to "personify" the object; Lawrence Krauss did this to great effect in Atom. And it helps if you can find a connection between your topic and a familiar object: graphene, for example, is a form of graphite, the material found in  pencils. (It is in turn related to another well-known form of carbon: diamond. Heat diamond to high enough temperatures and it will turn into graphite.) But even with a weak main character, it's still possible to hold the reader's interest with a strong plot and supporting cast of characters.

De Heer provided the crucial narrative framework I needed to tell the story of graphene's journey from obscure theoretical curiosity to a major contender to carbon nanotubes for nanoscale electronics. Graphene is the Little Material That Could.

Ten years ago, de Heer was among the many physicists working to characterize the many useful properties of carbon nanotubes (known henceforth as CNTs, since I'm tired of typing it out), especially their ability to conduct electricity with virtually no resistance. But unlike many of his colleagues, who hailed them as the Future of Nanoelectronics, he had his doubts that CNTs would ever realize their full potential. The obstacles were just too daunting. While they are easy enough to make, it's difficult to get CNTs of consistent sizes, with consistent electronic properties. That's not a problem if you're using CNTs to reinforce concrete or make better bulletproof vests for the military, but it's a crucial prerequisite to achieving the precise level of control needed to construct working electronic devices out of the materials.

Despite his pioneering work with CNTs, de Heer had a very different dream. He believes the primary value of CNT research has been to call attention to the useful properties of graphene, which has all of the same advantages and none of the drawbacks. (Among other advantages, graphene sheets could be produced using existing microelectronics manufacturing techniques.) The problem was that a decade ago, CNTs "pretty much stole the show," said de Heer. Numerous funding proposals were rejected by peer reviewers for federal funding agencies. But Intel saw the potential in de Heer's vision and funded his research when others did not: "I am eternally grateful to them for that." (His current work is funded both by Intel and the NSF.)

Intel's gamble might just pay off: in 2005, researchers succeeded in isolating graphene sheets. De Heer and his collaborators around the globe have since used the material to make proof-of-principle transistors, loop devices, and rudimentary electronic circuitry. There's still a lot of work that remains to be done to make graphene-based nanoelectronics a reality, but he says that for the first time there is a solid "road map" for achieving that goal.

Like most science, it's an ongoing story. But I, for one, am rooting for de Heer's graphene dreams.

Comments

[Kristin]

Interesting on how you observe that the condensed matter subjects get less public attention, though the more tangible results in this area always appealed to me more than the edges of the universe. It is true, though. Maybe the miracles in our iPods seem too familiar to us--the really amazing stuff has to be somewhere out there, not right under our noses.

I read Leslie Berlin's fine biography of Robert Noyce, The Man Behind the Microchip. Funny how he came up with the insight of the integrated circuit (contemporaneously and independently of Jack Kilby, who won half the 2000 Nobel Prize in physics--Noyce couldn't win posthumously), which gave rise to an entire multibillion dollar industry, yet Noyce is not a household name. Maybe it's no coincidence that Intel, which Noyce cofounded, was the one source of funding willing to take a chance on what seemed like a small and unglamorous solid state physics project. Noyce supported those kinds of projects all the time when he was alive.

[David Harris]

Now I know where I'm going to be reading all coverage of the APS March meeting seeing as I can't make it to report this year! Right here... Great and interesting take on the work, Jennifer... Thanks for taking the time to write this up on top of your official duties there!

[N. Peter Armitage]

Nuestra culpa. You’re right, Jennifer. We condensed matter physicists (henceforth CMP) have not been good with providing a compelling narrative for our research. There may be many reasons for this, but I believe it comes in part from a misconception of how we should sell ourselves to the public (and thereby funding agencies).

As a field we can be justifiably proud to have discovered the physics that led to the transistor, NMR, superconducting electronics etc etc. But this boon has also been a curse. It has made us lazy and has stifled our capacity to think creatively about outreach in areas where we don't have the crutch of technological promise to fall back on.

This is a luxury our cosmology colleagues don't have. They feel passionately about their research and they have to (get to?) convey that passion to the public (with predictably good results). We feel passionately about our research, but then feel compelled to tell boring stories about this or that new technology we might develop (which predictably elicits yawns and perhaps only a mental note to take advantage of said technology when it is available in Ipod form). We do this because we are bred and raised to think that technological promise is a somehow more legitimate motivation to the outside public than genuine fundamental scientific interest. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Due to our tremendous technological successes there is also the feeling then that at some level ALL our work should touch on technology. This is the easy strategy, but ultimately it hasn't been good for the health of the field. This is because, for many of us, technology isn’t our passion and it shows. Moreover, the research or aspect of research that has the greatest chance of evoking feelings of real awe and wonderment is typically the precise research that has the least chance of creating viable products. Perhaps this last statement is one regarding human nature itself.

This current modus operadi has lead to 3 things:

-A marginalization of some of the most exciting research (which may have no even tenuous connection to commercialization).

-Big promises about technological directions when it isn't warranted. And then consequences when results fail to live up to prognostications.

-And most relevant for the current discussion, a lack of focus at and practive on evoking awe and wonderment.

It is telling that virtually every Phys Rev Focus (short news release-style blurbs from the American Physical Society on notable discoveries) on CMP ends with a sentence or two about what technological impact said discovery will have. Sometimes these connections are tenuous at best. Oviously there is no similar onus in articles on cosmology and so those Focuses can focus on what it is that really excites the researchers (instead of the tenuous backstory technological connection). This is nothing against Phys. Rev. Focus, but serves to illustrate the prevailing philosophy in public outreach. The “public” can tell when we’re bluffing and they certainly can feel passion or lack thereof.

The reality is that many of us in CMP don't have the inclination or interest to 'make' anything at all. For instance, we may pursue novel states of matter at low temperature and consider the concept of emergence and the appearance of collective effects to be just as fundamental and irreducible as anything in string theory. We should promote what excites us in the manner that it excites us.

The research that Jennifer cites on graphene is a case in point. Yes, perhaps (but perhaps not) there is technological promise in graphene, but there is also a remarkable (and awe inspiring) fundamental side as well. Here we believe that the electrons in graphene are described by the same formalism that applies to the relativistic particles of the Dirac equation. One can simulate the rich structure of elementary particle physics in a table top experiment! I would posit that this kind of thing is much more likely to provoke enthusiasm from the public at large then any connection to graphene as yet another possible material in new computing devices.

Our cosmology and particle physics colleagues are raised academically to believe that knowledge for knowledge's sake is a good thing. By and large they do a wonderful job of conveying these ideas to the general public. Although we believe the same thing, we CMP have presented ourselves not as people who also have access to wild and wonderful things, but as people who are discovering stuff to make stuff. We have that, but there is so so much more. We need a new business model and a new narrative.

[JenLucPiquant]

Some excellent, thoughtful comments to this post -- probably more thoughtful than it deserves. :) I agree that there's perhaps been an over-emphasis on "discovering stuff to make stuff" in condensed matter physics. I've always found it to be a fascinating field, and I am fanatically devoted to my iPod. But as Peter says, there's so much more to it than better, faster, and cheaper electronics. There are lots of different ways to tell the story -- I just happened to pick de Heer's personal tale because it's the classic "underdog" story, something that always resonates with the public.

In contrast, it's extremely difficult to tell the story of electrons and the "Dirac equation" in a way that is comprehensible to a non-physicist. It takes a lot more work, for one thing, and we science writers can be as lazy as the next person when it comes to seeking out shortcuts or relying on tried-and-true approaches, rather than seeking out fresh takes with broader appeal. But it CAN be done, and be done well. You just need to make the connection.

[littlemoney]

I love physics subject in my high school years.