Photons instead of electrons. The scientist Jorge Bravo has designed a material that mimics the original. It is manufactured at low cost and has multiple applications.
The scientist Jorge Bravo is the Ferran Adrià of the materials . It deconstructs them. He has done it with many, but his potato omelette is graphene. After several years of research, Spanish has managed to understand it to the smallest detail, and as a result of deconstruction it has created a new artificial material from the original. He has christened it as photonic graphene. The first bastard son of the material of the future - "he is artificial graphene, we have deceived nature, " he explains to Teknautas - not only imitates the properties of natural graphene: it overcomes them. In addition, it is cheaper.
The Spanish likes to cite “the motto of new technology” by Nobel Herbert Kroemer, father of semiconductor electronics, when he has to review the possibilities of the new material. It says: "The most important applications of any technology that is new enough and innovative enough are applications created by that new technology."
Our graphene may be cheaper because we are not creating graphene; it is something different that mimics graphene and has properties that natural graphene would never have
Namely, in the scientific career there are only two types of innovations: those that improve pre-existing models and those that generate unpublished applications. In that sense, photonic graphene advances in both directions. On the one hand, they are developing revolutionary prototypes in the field of LEDs and photovoltaic panels. On the other, Jorge Bravo promises (as Jim Morrison would say) the new wine.
“There are applications that we have not yet made public. It's not about improving something, creating applications that don't exist yet. For example, before the laser existed there were no laser applications. That is the scheme in which we move. If a technology is innovative enough, you can create something totally new, which was not in anyone's mind, ”he adds.
What is photonic graphene? He responds himself. “I would say that it is simply an artificial graphene . Instead of having electric current spreading, we have pulses of light. We have taken all the ideas that have been developed on graphene to the field of photonics. ”
Short term applications
The scientist would not tell any of this if he had not patented the material in the United States. In fact, you can only talk about innovations that are shielded. “There are applications that are brutal, but I can talk about them until they are protected. My team would come with a gun: they would shoot me . ” However, they already have credentials to show.
The first: the design of ultra-flat and ultra-efficient LED sources. “Until we proposed our idea, LED emitters, such as cars or traffic lights, could not exceed a certain size. Actually, there were very powerful reasons to think like that, physical arguments ... We think the problem from a novel perspective, and thanks to photonic graphene we can manufacture devices with no size limit, ”says Bravo, chosen by MIT as one of the most young Spanish Innovators of this year.
The second, the manufacture of a new generation of solar panels. “The biggest challenge of the photovoltaic industry, which starts from the difficulty - very obvious - that if it is night or not clear, they do not work, is the use of energy. We have already proposed a photonic graphene plate for a prototype: it converts the sun's energy into laser light, and from it we generate a chemical reaction. This chemical energy is stored, and when we need it, the photonic graphene will deliver it to us at source. ”
Paradigm shift
Photonic graphene began to be conceived in the United States in 2010, during the residence of the Spanish scientist at MIT, but it has been brought to Spain. However, when he talks about innovation, Bravo does not believe in localities. “I am based in Spain, but the world of technology is a global world. I work with a team in Singapore and another one at MIT. You can't develop a new technology if you don't operate globally. ”
The main limitation by which today you cannot go to the corner and buy a device that has graphene incorporated, is that there is still no way to make it cheap and quality. We have turned the problem around: we have changed the manufacturing paradigm
“Everyone is studying graphene applications, at an incredible level. The number of patents is brutal: Samsung has 400 patents in graphene, and IBM 150. The EU invested 1, 000 million euros in graphene-based development in January, ” recalls Bravo. While thousands of researchers around the world go crazy trying to find an exact formula for making large-scale bafato gafreno, the Spanish scientist has taken the shortcut of the tabula rasa.
The main limitation by which today you cannot go to the corner and buy a device that has graphene incorporated, is that there is still no way to make it cheap and quality. We have turned the problem around: we have changed the manufacturing paradigm. Our graphene may be cheaper because we are not creating graphene; It is something else that mimics graphene and has properties that natural graphene would never have.
Source: http://www.elconfidencial.com/
Spanish scientist invents artificial graphene
