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Graphene: The Miracle Material

Graphene is 200 time stronger than steel, harder than diamond, super flexible, and an excellent conductor of heat and electricity—and yet is only one atom thick. It’s a material made out of a single layer of pure carbon atoms, arranged in a honeycomb lattice connected by the strongest bonds known to science. Basically, graphene is just a super-thin sheet of graphite, the material found in pencils—so thin that a stack of three million sheets would be just 1 mm thick. Physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov discovered it in 2004, and later received a Nobel Prize for their work because graphene is an incredibly versatile material—comparable to the vast range of uses that plastic has—and can even be modified to take on different properties: researchers have successfully made it magnetic. Graphene’s amazing mechanical, electrical and optical properties mean that it could be used for vast range of applications, from stronger and lighter car and airplane parts, to super-tough textiles, to healthcare, to a replacement for silicon in nano-electronics—which could lead to faster, thinner and more flexible electronic devices. It may be some years before we see these applications fully realised because there are still obstacles to overcome, but there’s no doubt that graphene has incredible and unparalleled potential.

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Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are allotropes of carbon with a cylindrical nanostructure. Nanotubes have been constructed with length-to-diameter ratio of up to 132,000,000:1,^[1] significantly larger than for any other material. These cylindrical carbonmolecules have unusual properties, which are valuable for nanotechnology, electronics, optics and other fields of materials science and technology. In particular, owing to their extraordinary thermal conductivity and mechanical and electricalproperties, carbon nanotubes find applications as additives to various structural materials. For instance, nanotubes form only a tiny portion of the material(s) in (primarily carbon fiber) baseball bats, golf clubs, or car parts.^[2]

Nanotubes are members of the fullerene structural family, which also includes the spherical buckyballs, and the ends of a nanotube may be capped with a hemisphere of the buckyball structure. Their name is derived from their long, hollow structure with the walls formed by one-atom-thick sheets of carbon, called graphene. These sheets are rolled at specific and discrete (“chiral”) angles, and the combination of the rolling angle and radius decides the nanotube properties; for example, whether the individual nanotube shell is a metal or semiconductor. Nanotubes are categorized as single-walled nanotubes (SWNTs) and multi-walled nanotubes (MWNTs). Individual nanotubes naturally align themselves into “ropes” held together by van der Waals forces, more specifically, pi-stacking.

Applied quantum chemistry, specifically, orbital hybridization best describes chemical bonding in nanotubes. The chemical bonding of nanotubes is composed entirely of sp² bonds, similar to those of graphite. These bonds, which are stronger than the sp³ bonds found in alkanes and diamond, provide nanotubes with their unique strength.