What makes graphene transparent

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Improve this answer. Philip Gibbs - inactive Philip Gibbs - inactive 8, 1 1 gold badge 29 29 silver badges 39 39 bronze badges. Quantumplate Quantumplate 1 1 gold badge 6 6 silver badges 17 17 bronze badges. A Faraday cage also has lots of holes, but still it isn't transparent for radio waves. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password.

Post as a guest Name. Suggestions or feedback? Previous image Next image. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Search MIT. Search websites, locations, and people. Enter keywords to search for news articles: Submit. Browse By. MIT researchers find that adding a coating of graphene has little effect on how a surface interacts with liquids — except in extreme cases.

A new study by scientists at Rice University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute RPI has determined that gold, copper and silicon get just as wet when clad by a single continuous layer of graphene as they would without. The research, reported this week in the online edition of Nature Materials , is significant for scientists learning to fine-tune surface coatings for a variety of applications.

A typical surface of graphite, the form of carbon most commonly known as pencil lead, should be hydrophobic, Ajayan said.

But in the present study, the researchers found to their surprise that a single- atom An atom is the smallest component of an element. It is made up of protons and neutrons within the nucleus, and electrons circling the nucleus. Piling on more layers reduces wetting; at about six layers, graphene essentially becomes graphite. An interesting aspect of the study, Ajayan said, may be the ability to change such surface properties as conductivity while retaining wetting characteristics.

Because pure graphene is highly conductive, the discovery could lead to a new class of conductive, yet impermeable, surface coatings, he said. The caveat is that wetting transparency was observed only on surfaces most metals and silicon where interaction with water is dominated by weak van der Waals forces, and not for materials like glass, where wettability is dominated by strong chemical bonding, the team reported.