Petra Szilagyi reports that graphene, a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon, is stronger than steel and as stiff as diamond. Yet, this tough, thin material can also be induced to peel itself to pieces. Puncturing a hole in graphene with a diamond tip and repeatedly moving that tip back and forth, rather like rucking up a carpet, causes narrow strips of carbon to curl spontaneously upwards, tearing out of the graphene layer and even folding back on themselves, scientists from Trinity College Dublin report in an article in Nature on 13 July.
The discovery is entirely surprising, says James Tour, a specialist in nanotechnology at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Tour says that since the technique is in its infancy and the researchers has not yet demonstrated they can control it, it is hard to see exactly how it could be used. But the discoverers of the effect, physicists Graham Cross and James Annett, think that it should be possible to control the size of the ribbons and the way that they peel and fold, potentially making them useful in electronic circuitry.
There are many ways to carve shapes out of graphene, such as using chemicals, lasers or oxygen plasma to etch away unwanted parts of a graphene sheet. Last year, a group led by physicist Paul McEuen at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, created complex cuts and folds in graphene, a process which they likened to kirigami, the Japanese art of paper cutting. But the Cross and Annett method works under milder conditions and could be used to make many ribbons quickly, the researchers think, because each shape does not have to be laboriously carved.
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