Friday, November 11, 2005
Super Thin -- Super Fast
Pardon me while I go all nerd on you for a minute. This teaser peice from Scientific American is way cool. It's about graphite. This link will take you to some stuff to help you visualize what I'm talking about here.Think of graphite as a ream of paper with a lubricant between each sheet -- they slide over each other easily, but surface tension effects make it hard to actually separate them.
The lubricant between each sheet is a resonating cloud of electrons -- it would take me forever to explain what that is, and I doubt you'd still get it unless you can do quantum mechanics, but anyway, you can think of that lubricant as a wire -- ready to conduct electricity. However, when its all stacked up the wire doesn't work that well.
The article talks about someone finally figuring out how to get a single sheet of graphite and test it. The result is a material that could do computing at mono-atomic thicknesses, and much higher speeds than today's semi-conductors at room temperature. This could be the beginning of super-micro-computers. Now that would be cool.
