A team of researchers at Georgia Tech have discovered a way to use graphene to transport electrons with virtually no resistance. Known as ballistic transport, this property is accomplished when electrons travel through graphene nanoribbons and behave more like optical waveguides or quantum dots.
According to Walt de Heer, Regent Professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, “this could result in a new class of coherent electronic devices based on room temperature ballistic transport in graphene. Such devices would be very different from what we make today in silicon.” Over the last decade, scientists have been trying to use graphene to mimic silicon semiconductor chips, but haven’t succeeded due to limitations in electronic bandgap in thin lattices of carbon atoms.
