There’s a few reasons for this. There’s a few ways to make graphene. You can use CVD or you can use mechanical exfoliation. Mechanical exfoliation requires scotch tape and scales to maybe a flake per hour per grad student. CVD is quite scalable but makes shitty graphene. A lot of graphene breakthroughs (superconductivity for instance) needs mechanically exfoliated graphene.
Secondly, process fab is VERY conservative. There’s numerous amazing ferroelectrics that you can grow tons of that would absolutely spank NAND flash. However, they’re not silicon fab, so nobody makes them.
> There’s numerous amazing ferroelectrics that you can grow tons of that would absolutely spank NAND flash. However, they’re not silicon fab, so nobody makes them.
So why doesn't somebody new start making them and put all the current flash producers out of business?
Is there actually a special property of scotch tape that makes it the ideal candidate over some more specialized industrial adhesive? Or are these references to scotch tape generally just references to the fact that you _can_ use scotch tape like the original graphene experiment?
It happens to have a good level of stickiness. People also use blue nitto tape, and tape used for fixturing on dicing saws. I think basically anything could work, it's just that people use what's lying around.
It's because it's just about impossible to handle: the number one thing a sheet of graphene wants to do is stick another sheet of graphene on top of it and become...regular graphite.
It takes a long time to go from lab bench and physics papers to practical use to mass produced and generally available practical use.
Graphene has incredible properties as a structural material too but so far producing it at that scale and making it behave properly in things like composites has been very hard. But the physics says once we get it to work we have composites many times stronger than steel or materials like Kevlar.
The kids these days are so spoiled. Silicon doping was discovered like when? And how long did it take to make a practical transistor?
Seriously through, it's not every new discovered phenomena owes you something.
Lol I'm obviously joking, I'm probably younger than both OP and 70% of people out here. But my point that the nature doesn't owe us anything still stands. University press releases are really to blame for building up unrealistic expectations, but then you can't expect them to honestly tell you "we spend millions on things with zero practical applicability just because it's awesome".
It’s okay. Next year we will defeat and reverse aging with one simple trick so you can wait longer, at least according to the latest health science click bait.
I will not rest until I have you immortal, flying your fusion powered car, using augmented reality VR controls, to your very own immersive shopping experience with AI assistant android sexbots catering to your every whim and I will not REM enhanced super-sleep until that happens!
Secondly, process fab is VERY conservative. There’s numerous amazing ferroelectrics that you can grow tons of that would absolutely spank NAND flash. However, they’re not silicon fab, so nobody makes them.