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Graphene, one of the world's thinnest electronic nanomaterials, has long held the promise as a wonder material in everything from flexible touchscreens to super-fast circuits. It's that interest in semiconductors that led my team to build the world's most advanced, fully functional integrated circuit ...

For years, scientists have struggled to build graphene-based electronics that could do the same thing as silicon superconductor chips. A new breakthrough from an international team of scientists might just change all that. These geniuses just invented a new form of graphene that's ten times more conductive.

The trick to this new form of graphene is that it allows electrons to act like photons. The impressive material is simply nanoribbons of epitaxial graphene—that's the honeycomb arrangement of carbon atoms you're used to seeing to illustrate graphene—that's manufactured using a relatively simple process.

The scientists grew the nanoribbons on silicone carbide wafers in which they had etched circuit patterns using standard microelectronics techniques. The silicone was then heated to about 1,000º Celsius, melting the silicone off and leaving these novel graphene nanoribbons with perfectly smooth edges. The graphene forms spontaneously on the etched edges of the silicon.

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