Inaugural Lecture of the 22nd Erasmus Smiths Professorship

Inaugural Lecture of the 22nd Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy

Kitchen Physics: Using the power of nano to turn pencils into electronic devices using only things found at home

Jonathan N Coleman

School of Physics and CRANN, Trinity College Dublin, D2, Ireland

Recently, scientists and engineers have been getting ever more excited about nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes and graphene. The first atomically thin material, graphene, is found as sheets of carbon, one atom thick but many, many thousands of atoms across. Because of its 2-dimensional nature, graphene displays a host of exciting properties: it is the thinnest, most impermeable and most conductive material known to man. Similarly, graphene’s 1-dimensional cousin, the carbon nanotube, is one of the strongest and stretchiest material ever made.

I will introduce graphene and other nano materials before demonstrating how we can not only make them, but fabricate them into useful devices, using (almost) only things found in the kitchen. At first I will demonstrate how simple the production of graphene can be, requiring only pencils, soap and a kitchen blender. Then, how to use it? You will hear about how 2-dimensional materials can be printed into surfaces using an inkjet printer and even formed into electronic devices such as light-detectors and transistors. I will also show how graphene can be combined with house-hold things like elastic bands and silly putty to prepare state of the art sensors which can detect anything from spider footprints to the human pulse. Finally, I will show how the physics of mud inspired using carbon nanotubes to make the best batteries ever and how building materials for future moon bases will be built out of sand with a sprinkling of nano.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Fitzgerald Building, School of Physics, Fitzgerald Building, Dublin, Ireland