AN ANCIENT art form just got bang up to date. Graphene – sheets of carbon just one-atom thick – has been folded like origami. The technique could be used to build nano-robots and tiny, flexible circuits.
A team led by Itai Cohen of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, coated a single layer of graphene with a layer of silicon dioxide glass. Where they were bonded to carbon atoms, the glass molecules responded differently depending on temperature, pH and charge, bending some and holding others still. These responses let the team predict how the graphene would expand and contract, and thus fold.
“This really represents the limit,” says Cohen. “There’s not going to be any way to make the sheet thinner.” The team presented the work at the American Physical Society annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland this week.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Graphene gets itself in a fold”