Graphene pushes popularity of Rice papers
November 29th, 2011A decade ago, nobody had ever heard of graphene. Now the single-atom-thick sheet of carbon is the focus of intense research at labs all over the world, nowhere more than at Rice University.
The Rice lab of Professor James Tour finds itself among the most highly regarded graphene labs in the world with three of the top eight places on a ranking of the previous month’s most-read papers in the prestigious American Chemical Society journal, ACS Nano.
At No. 2 on the hit parade is the paper titled “Growth of Graphene from Food, Insects and Waste” by Tour, the T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science; and Gedeng Ruan, Zhengzong Sun and Zhiwei Peng, all graduate students in Tour’s lab. The paper sprang from a visit earlier this year by a local troop of Girl Scouts who took part in an experiment to turn a box of Girl Scout Cookies into graphene. They determined that at current rates, a box of cookies could produce graphene worth $15 billion.
At No. 3 is “Growth of Bilayer Graphene on Insulating Substrates.” The authors are Tour, graduate students Peng, Sun, Zheng Yan, former graduate student Jun Yao, postdoctoral research associates Yu Zhu and Zheng Lio and Pulickel Ajayan, Rice’s Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and of chemistry.
At No. 8 is “Direct Growth of Bilayer Graphene on SiO2 Substrates by Carbon Diffusion Through Nickel.” Tour, Peng, Yan and Sun are co-authors.
Papers from Rice have proven popular with the journal’s readers over the past year. A 12-month ranking of most-read papers has five, led by four Rice professors, among the top 20. They are:
No. 4: “Improved Synthesis of Graphene Oxide” by the Tour Group.
No. 5: “Growth of Graphene from Food, Insects and Waste” by the Tour Group.