Graphene’s behavior depends on where it sits
When you look at a gift-wrapped present, the basic properties of the wrapping paper — say, its colors and texture — are not generally changed by the nature of the gift inside. But surprising new experiments conducted at MIT show that a one-atom-thick material called graphene, a form of pure carbon whose atoms are joined in a chicken-wire-like lattice, behaves quite differently depending on the nature of material it’s wrapped around. When sheets of graphene are placed on substrates made of different materials, fundamental properties — such as how the graphene conducts electricity and how it interacts chemically with other materials — can be drastically different, depending on the nature of the underlying material.“We were quite surprised” to discover this altered behavior, says Michael Strano, the Charles and Hilda Roddey Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, who is the senior author of a paper published this week in the journal...