Honey: a cost-effective, non-toxic substitute for graphene manipulation

said braka 10:04 PM
Ordonez' lab mate and friend Cody Hayashi gave him

some store-bought honey as a Christmas gift and anti-inflammatory for his stomach, and Ordonez kept it near his work station for daily use. One day in the lab, the duo was investigating various dielectric materials they could use to fabricate a  transistor. First, the team tried to utilize water as a top-gate dielectric to manipulate graphene's electrical conductivity. This approach was unsuccessful, so they proceeded with various compositions of sugar and deionized water, another electrolyte, which still resulted in negligible performance. That's when the honey caught Ordonez' eye, and an accidental scientific breakthrough was realized.
The finding is detailed in a paper in Nature Scientific Reports, in which the team describes how honey produces a nanometer-sized electric double layer at the interface with graphene that can be used to gate the ambipolar transport of graphene.
"As a top-gate dielectric, water is much too conductive, so we moved to sugar and de-ionized water to control the ionic composition in hopes we could reduce conductivity," Ordonez explained. "However, sugar water didn't work for us either because, as a gate-dielectric, there was still too much leakage current. Out of frustration, literally inches away from me was the honey Cody had bought, so we decided to drop-cast the honey on graphene to act as top-gate dielectric— I thought maybe the honey would mimic dielectric gels I read about in literature. To our surprise—everyone said it's not going to work—we tried and it did."
Ordonez, Hayashi, and a team of researchers from SSC Pacific, in collaboration with the University of Hawai′i at Mānoa, have been developing novel graphene devices as part of a Navy Innovative Science and Engineering (NISE)-funded effort to imbue the Navy with inexpensive, lightweight, flexible graphene-based devices that can be used as next-generation sensors and wearable devices.


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-honey-cost-effective-non-toxic-substitute-graphene.html#jCp