News from the right side of the number line: Graphene, a possible replacement for silicon in computer chips, and a DVD-sized storage device that can hold more than a thousand DVDs

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

One of the paths to the singularity, and the one that is mostly readily plausible given the current state of physics, is nanotechnology. Here are two new nano-entities ready to break out of the laboratory.

First, how would you like to store your entire movie collection on one DVD-sized disc?

A DVD that can store up to 2,000 films could usher in an age of three-dimensional TV and ultra-high definition viewing, scientists say.

The ultra-DVD is the same size and thickness as a conventional disc, but uses nano-technology to store vast amounts of information.

Scientists believe it could be on sale in five years and say it will revolutionise the way we store films, music and data. 

One disc could back up the memory of a computer or record thousands of hours of film.

The breakthrough comes from Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, where scientists created a prototype using ‘nano rods’ – tiny particles of gold too small to see – and polarised light, in which the light waves only flow in one direction.

Professor Min Gu, whose findings appear in the journal Nature, said: ‘We were able to show how nano-structured material can be incorporated on to a disc to increase data capacity without increasing the size of the disc.’

A DVD can hold up to 8.5 gigabytes of information, enough for a movie, several special features and an alternative soundtrack.

Blu-ray discs, which were designed to replace them, can store 50GB, enough for a film and extra features in high definition.

But ultra-DVDs will be able to store ten terabytes – or 10,000GB.

Of much greater moment, consider Graphene, a perfect carbon structure one atom thick.

Eight MIT researchers, along with colleagues at Harvard and Boston University, have just received a major U.S. Department of Defense grant for graphene research. With this five-year grant, Palacios says, MIT and its collaborators “would become one of the strongest multidisciplinary teams working on graphene in the world.”

Its unique electrical characteristics could make graphene the successor to silicon in a whole new generation of microchips, surmounting basic physical constraints limiting the further development of ever-smaller, ever-faster silicon chips.

But that’s only one of the material’s potential applications. Because of its single-atom thickness, pure graphene is transparent, and can be used to make transparent electrodes for light-based applications such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) or improved solar cells. The potential solar cell applications are now being studied by some MIT researchers including Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering Vladimir Bulovic and Associate Dean of Engineering for Research Karen Gleason.

Graphene could also substitute for copper to make the electrical connections between computer chips and other electronic devices, providing much lower resistance and thus generating less heat. And it also has potential uses in quantum-based electronic devices that could enable a new generation of computation and processing.

“The field is really in its infancy,” says Michael Strano, associate professor of chemical engineering who has been investigating the chemical properties of graphene. “I don’t think there’s any other material like this.”

The mobility of electrons in graphene — a measure of how easily electrons can flow within it — is by far the highest of any known material. So is its strength, which is, pound for pound, 200 times that of steel. Yet like its cousin diamond, it is a remarkably simple material, composed of nothing but carbon atoms arranged in a simple, regular pattern.

“It’s the most extreme material you can think of,” says Palacios. “For many years, people thought it was an impossible material that couldn’t exist in nature, but people have been studying it from a theoretical point of view for more than 60 years.”

Palacios and his team just last month published new results showing that graphene can be used to make frequency multipliers that could enable much faster computer chips and communications devices.

When you turn on the television and find nothing but one beggar after another bitching about how no one will give him an unearned dollar, take a moment to remember this: It’s raining soup. It always will be, as long as human beings are free to use their minds.