How ‘Magic Angle’ Graphene Is Stirring Up Physics | Hacker News Reader

How ‘Magic Angle’ Graphene Is Stirring Up Physics

nature.com

129 pointstoufiqbarhamov31 comments

I'm a long time friend with Pablo, the main researcher behind this discovery, since our time together at the university.

Every time this pops up there is some comment dismissing the discovery as yet another graphene theoretical breakthrough with no practical application. This discovery can help us better understand superconductivity at high temperatures, and that along will qualify it as a major discovery. It can also be super important in practice if we manage to bring graphene out of the lab.

Not everything hits mass market in a 5 years timeframe... in the short term it may seem we have a slow rate of adoption of new technologies, but if you take a step back you can see the rate is fabulous. Graphene, batteries, solar cells and before them, transistors, nuclear power, etc. may take a while to hit the market, when they hit it they hit it hard.

> Not everything hits mass market in a 5 years timeframe... in the short term it may seem we have a slow rate of adoption of new technologies, but if you take a step back you can see the rate is fabulous. Graphene, batteries, solar cells and before them, transistors, nuclear power, etc. may take a while to hit the market, when they hit it they hit it hard.

Most of those older comparisons still aren't flattering to graphene. We're nearly 15 years away from Geim and Novoselov's Sellotape trick now. 14 years after the first working laser in 1960 (though the first maser was in '53 and apparently the first paper was '51) the first supermarket barcode scanner was in operation, while Xerox PARC already had a working laser printer system. The first transistor was late 1947: the first consumer transistor radio was 1954 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regency_TR-1 , and the US military had been using transistors well before that. Calder Hill nuclear power station (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield ) opened in 1956, about 14 years after the Manhattan Project and Chicago Pile-1.

We already have some graphene applications in the market. We may not get a graphene rope, just like we don't have a nuclear boosted car, but that doesn't mean there are not practical applications in the market and others expected to hit the market in a few years.

Your first comment says not everything hits the market in a 5 year timeframe and now you say we already have graphene applications on the market. What are these applications and why don't they count against your opening comment?

Because they're still small applications and not what everyone is looking for. Just like other technologies first got to the market in some small niche applications, and it took decades to fully realize their potential.

Super interesting approach. I worked on superconductivity during my time in Academia and my supervisor worked on high-Tc superconductors. Really fascinating to see the similarities here, as the high-Tc superconductors also seem to gain their superconductivity from their layered 2D structure. From my understanding Graphene offers a way to experiment with such layers in a more direct way by stacking them with an angle. I also think this could lead to many interesting new discoveries and material systems, but as you said it can take many decades for something like this to yield applied results such as new technologies. Still it’s absolutely worth it!

> Pablo, the main researcher behind this discovery

Trivial quibble, but Cao Yuan's the first author and lead researcher for these papers and unfortunately not directly mentioned -- I heard he had to argue for taking this approach to graphene.

Thank you for the correction. You're right, I should have said "one of the main researchers [...]".

Pablo is the third author of the main paper.

"Twistronics" has to be the coolest name I've seen in a while

I wonder what happens if you stack more than two layers, adjusting by 1 degree with each layer.

This is mentioned in the article, with three payers you don't even need to rotate: "Meanwhile, Feng Wang at the University of California, Berkeley, says he and his colleagues have seen signs of superconductivity in triple-stacked layers of graphene even without a twist. Layering three sheets in a particular orientation8 achieves a superlattice geometry similar to that in magic-angle twisted bilayers, and results in similarly strongly correlated physics, he says."

I still am waiting for Graphene to deliver a tenth of what was foretasted. Graphene has good company with Fuel Cells and every single new battery technology over the past 20 years.

Graphene has a big advantage over them, although it is slow to deliver. New batteries or affordable fuel cells require breakthroughs in materials science, especially in the case of fuel cells. Inventing novel, cheap, mass-produceable catalysts to replace something like platinum, or a novel battery chemistry is a monumental challenge. Graphene already exists, but the propeties of the material are complex, and affordable mass production at the desirable scale is prohibitively expensive. Still, it exists, it can be made and manipulated, but a lot of exploration into its properties remains.

I’d expect Graphene to be useful with a couple of decades, possibly sooner, while I wouldn’t even venture a guess on breakthrough batteries or fuel cells.

The solid state batteries from ionic materials (https://ionicmaterials.com/) seem very promising in a quicker timeframe. Ie I could imagine them being able to fit a much higher density in the same volume given the stability of the material.

First I’ve heard of this company, but some Google-Fu reveals a lot of reasons to trust your optimism. They apparently got a $3m ARPA-E grant as well, and are producing something that works through a range of temperatures without forming denrites. Plus an increase in energy density of 115Wh/kg, while increasing stability and safety, even to rupture.

Wow!

It seems like graphene production at scale is something states should be putting money and resources into. It's the kind of thing much more amenable to a "new Manhattan Project" than something like AI.

> It seems like graphene production at scale is something states should be putting money and resources into.

They do.

https://polska.pl/science/achievements-science/graphene-prod...

They created a company that does it, and you can buy graphene from them.

https://www.graphene-info.com/nano-carbon

Turns out there are lots of different kinds of graphene, and despite all the hype - the demand for the kind we can produce at the current prices - just isn't that big.

Turns out there are lots of different kinds of graphene, and despite all the hype - the demand for the kind we can produce at the current prices - just isn't that big.

As I recall, this is because what can be produced at scale today is, to speak, crap. Authentic, reasonably pure, graphene has all sorts of amazing properties when created in labs but you have these companies producing more or less junk that doesn't get any larger-scale production going. In ways, "starting a company" to produce graphene now has been the source of a lot of the problem. Scientists attempting to apply graphene results wind-up buying junk graphene and failing.

The point of large scale state investment over time, not dependent on immediately making money, is to get beyond these problems. There's the risk that even a lot of spending won't get you a way of producing good graphene at scale - well that's the risk. State finance is all about being the way such large-scale risk can be taken.

This. There was a paper published recently[1], and a writeup in Nature[2] about it, which tested 60 different suppliers of graphene and found virtually all of them were junk and didn't match the ISO definition of graphene (i.e. 10 or fewer layers of atoms).

[1] https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.201803784

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06939-4

This is a study about graphene produced by liquid‐phase exfoliation.

The company I linked produces graphene of supposedly better quality by chemical vapour deposition. It apparently still isn't the kind we want (because otherwise they would be much more famous and rich).

The Manhattan project had an immediate, predictable return to its funders of "It will let us kill a lot of fascists, really quickly."

Cui bono? Who will benefit from the DOE sinking a billion tax dollars into building graphene fabs? Will that benefit be greater then sinking it into something else?

> Who will benefit from the DOE sinking a billion tax dollars into building graphene fabs?

Isn't that the answer that {your_country} should own these industries before China/Russia/etc does?

Because you can bet China is investing. I know someone who used to be the general manager of a large Chinese manufacturing plant, and all he wanted to talk about was how graphene was/is/will change whatever industry/tech I discussed.

From a US perspective, there's billions wasted on make-work programs (TSA) and corporate handouts and subsidies that would greatly increase the tax base and develop local markets by reinvesting instead into new tech.

What does it matter to me that Boeing is an American firm, owned by a bunch of international institutional investors, as opposed to a Korean one, owned by a bunch of international institutional investors? Is it because there used to be a Boeing factory in my town, before they moved all the jobs to somewhere cheaper?

To put it another way - why should I care that a few private companies in {my_country} own these industries? Their owners aren't paying me dividends, I'm not going to pay for their R&D. If you want to sink this money into building a state-owned industry, where the profits are distributed between the people, sure, that's another story, we can talk about that. If not, appealing to nationalism is a poor motivator for me to fund your cottage industry. If you want my money, make me a shareholder.

> From a US perspective, there's billions wasted on make-work programs (TSA) and corporate handouts and subsidies that would greatly increase the tax base and develop local markets by reinvesting instead into new tech.

So, the solution is corporate handouts for industries that you like? Handouts for people growing corn, or groping your junk when you cross borders are bad, but handouts for people making graphene are good? (Unlike corn, the jury's still out on whether or not it will actually be useful. Maybe it's the next plastic. Maybe it's the next beanie baby. Maybe it's the next asbestos. It's too early to tell, and "Let's manufacture tonnes of it, before anyone has any use for it" is a solution in search of a problem.)

I mean, sure, our current allocation of spending is probably not optimal[1]. I do think, that the onus is on you to demonstrate that sinking a billion dollars into building a graphene fab is better then sinking a billion dollars into killing fossil fuels, or shrinking classroom sizes, or providing free early-age child-care, or free flu shots[2], or any one of a dozen other things we should be doing[3].

[1] To be fair, I am 100% certain it is not optimal.

[2] http://info.totalwellnesshealth.com/blog/bid/190040/How-to-M... - The ROI of a flu shot is >200%.

[3] Not to mention that a lot of the time, being the first mover in an industry is unnecessary. Let someone else figure out if something is worth doing. If its that important, a sovereign state can always catch up, and develop a local industry, through incentives and tariffs - once the field is proven.

Not sure why all the down votes but we still haven't found 14 years in how to use it in a consumer device.

http://www.mining.com/these-are-just-15-ways-in-which-graphe...

"But after 13 years since researchers first created the revolutionary material from graphite, consumers is still waiting to see some of the touted applications in the market." 2017

Graphene has good company with Fuel Cells and every single new battery technology over the past 20 years.

They're here and in use. To give an example NMC batteries, which enabled smartphones, hoverboards, cleaning robots and other gadgets have been around since 2008 or so.

EDIT: grammar.

It took about 20 years from the first proposed lithium batteries until the first commercial one in 1991, at it wasn't until the last 10 years that they've really taken off.

I remember what it was like 20 years ago. There were a whole host of things we didn't have, at least partially because battery technology was so much worse.

It usually takes more than 20 years to go from lab bench to wide application.

I'm still[1] waiting on those silicon nanowire batteries. 8 more years!

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/dnlnf/breakthrough...

They're being used now, albeit only in cost-insensitive applications like drones:

"Amprius' Silicon Nanowire Lithium Ion Batteries Power Airbus Zephyr S HAPS Solar Aircraft"

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/amprius-silicon-nan...

Thing is, we know what those are, we can give you a plan that will work. We can give you an atom-by-atom plan of those.

We just can't make them (and we're very far away from that atm).

(and yes a pretty good criticism is that we could 4x or so current battery designs' performance as well given atom-by-atom manufacturing capability)

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