Papers with embedded #graphene

Not every paper about the wonder material advertises its presence from the hilltops, or even in the title. Take Measuring the lateral size of liquid-exfoliated nanosheets with dynamic light scattering. This is another of those ‘catch it while you can’ papers in the IoPP journal Nanotechnology (doi:10.1088/0957-4484/24/26/265703). They do flag graphene in the abstract, saying that “we prepared a range of dispersions of graphene, MoS₂ and WS₂ nanosheets with different mean lateral sizes”. In essence, though, they are interested in working with “two-dimensional materials”, including graphene. The idea behind this research seems to have been to develop “a simple method to estimate the lateral dimensions of nanosheets dispersed in a liquid”.

The people behind the work, at Trinity College Dublin and Imperial College London, warn that their technique “is not highly accurate” but it has the advantage that it is “fast, simple and used equipment available in most analytical labs”. They conclude that “it it is perfectly suited to preliminary measurements or comparison of samples where a large size differential is expected”.

Lost in spacetime

There’s another embedded reference to graphene in Analogue Transformations in Physics and their Application to Acoustics Nature Scientific Reports (doi:10.1038/srep02009). This time the paper is all about “invisibility cloaks”, materials that can play tricks with electromagnetic radiation (EMR), that’s light to most of us, and hide things from prying eyes. The science soon gets hairy with references to “a complete transformation method using the idea of analogue spacetimes”. In this case, they are more interested in sound waves than in EMR.

Graphene comes into the picture because, according to the researchers from all over Europe, well from Finland to Spain taking in The Netherlands, “The method is general and could be considered as a new paradigm for controlling waves in different branches of physics, from acoustics in quantum fluids to graphene electronics.” They even went so far as to “give explicit designs of a dynamic compressor, a spacetime cloak for acoustic waves and a carpet cloak for a moving aircraft”.