Research found that graphene materials have self-healing properties

Russian physicist Andrei Heim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom have won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their research on graphene materials. Recently, they have made some new progress in the study of graphene: According to the MIT Science and Technology Entrepreneurship magazine, the research team led by Novoselov found that the graphene material under certain conditions broke through a hole. Can repair itself.

The Novoselov group initially used electron beams to drill holes in graphene and used nickel/palladium atoms to stabilize the carbon atoms around the holes to further stabilize what would happen next under an electron microscope. . But when they added some substances containing carbon atoms, a wonderful phenomenon occurred. The carbon atoms at the edge of the hole dissociated from the palladium/nickel atoms and combined with the external carbon atoms to repair the "hole." If a hydrocarbon compound containing other atoms is used, the repaired graphene cannot maintain a configuration of a regular hexagon, but if pure foreign carbon is added, the repair is perfect.

The researchers said that the biggest breakthrough in the self-repairing properties of graphene discovered this time was to find a way to make graphene into any shape, and it was also of great significance for the maintenance of graphene circuits in the future. However, it is not clear how fast the self-repair process is, and the accuracy needs to be improved. The preliminary research results are published on the open source research paper platform Arxiv.org and are of interest to be consulted.