Graphene has slowly been gaining its reputation as a great material option for flexible electronics and could eventually be used as a replacement option for materials such as indium tin oxide, or ITO, as a transparent conductor.
Researchers, however, were recently able to demonstrate that graphene's flexibility can be used in number of other ways because it can be twisted to alter its electrical properties.
The paper was first published by the researchers in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. The researchers, who are from Rice University, were able to display how graphene can be used by engineers to produce the "flexoelectric effect," in which materials show polarization after being exposed to strain. The study was done in collaboration with scientists in Moscow.
Graphene is known among scientists to be an excellent electrical conductor when it is laid out flat in a way that all atoms have a balanced electrical charge, but if there is a curve put in the plane of the graphene, the electron bonds on one side of the graphene compress, while those on the other side stretch. Because of this, the dipole moment, which is defined as a measure of the polarity of the graphene, is changed.
Researchers then ran tests on each possible curvature and how those curvatures impacted the graphene's dipole moment, and in doing so, determined how the graphene's electrical properties could be changed.
"While the dipole moment is zero for flat graphene or cylindrical nanotubes, in between there is a family of cones, actually produced in laboratories, whose dipole moments are significant and scale linearly with cone length," said the lead researcher on the project, Boris Yakobson, in a statement.
According to Yakobson, the research could help solve a number of important issues in engineering with graphene.
With graphene being able to conduct electricity even more efficiently than copper and being very flexible, it is largely seen as a big part of the future of technology, especially when it comes to things like flexible displays. A number of companies and research labs have been exploring the possibilities of graphene, but many of these possibilities, most researchers suggest, haven't even been discovered yet.
