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I m a g e C o u r t e s y o F I a n a k y I l D I Z / g e o r g I a t e C

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tuning in to Graphene
New ultra-fast wireless antennas may be on the way,
but don’t throw away your old wireless router just yet.

In march Of this year, a team at he Georgia Institute of Tech- nology made headlines when it revealed plans for a new micro- scopic antenna built out of graphene, a synthetic form of carbon with remarkable conductive properties.

Early press coverage focused on the
promise of speedier wireless connec-
tions, and with good reason: such an
antenna could, in principle, allow for
terabit-per-second transfer speeds—
fast enough to download a high-defini-
tion movie in a fraction of a second. At
distances of a few centimeters, down-
load speeds could approach an aston-
ishing 100 terabits per second—the
equivalent of three months’ worth of
HD footage.

While the prospect of faster down-
loads might come as welcome news
to legions of everyday Web surfers, the
technology’s long-term potential ex-
tends well beyond the problem of eas-
ing Internet bottlenecks. Researchers
are starting to explore a wide range of
potential applications for graphene na-
no-antennas, such as linking the inter-
nal components of electronic devices
or creating fine-tuned sensor networks
capable of thwarting chemical or bio-
logical attacks.

Before any of those ideas can come to fruition, however, researchers will need to overcome a number of formidable hurdles—not least of which involves the prohibitive cost of making graphene in the first place.

In 2004, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester invented graphene by taking strips of graphite (the same technology that pow-

Science | DOI: 10.1145/2507771.2507776 Alex Wright

the structure of a graphene-based plasmonic nano-transceiver for wireless communication in the terahertz band. +-

Source Gate

SPP Wave

Drain
Square voltage
signal generator
To
the
antenna