Carbon-Based Cellphones on the Horizon

One of the biggest knocks against cellphones is they require small amounts of rare earth elements: gallium, indium and arsenic, for example, that are both scarce and expensive. But what if you could make a phone out of a more common element, like carbon?

Researchers are taking slow but sure steps toward building the innards of a cellphone out of carbon nanotubes, a structure that resembles a microscopic sheet of chicken wire rolled into a cylinder. These cylinders can be used to either conduct electricity or store energy.

At the Technical University of Denmark, Jakob Wagner and colleagues have found a better way to build carbon nanotubes that could lead to their use as a semiconductor, a key component of all electronic circuit parts found in both cellphones and laptops. Carbon nanotubes have properties of both a metal and a semiconductor, depending on how they are rolled. Read more…

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