Graphene-based Nanoantennas Could Allow WLANs of Nanodevices 45
Freshly Exhumed writes "With the onslaught of graphene experimentation, especially in computing and RF, news from IEEE Spectrum comes that researchers at Georgia Tech have computer-modeled nanoantennas made from graphene that could provide wireless network communications between nanoscopic devices. "We are exploiting the peculiar propagation of electrons in graphene to make a very small antenna that can radiate at much lower frequencies than classical metallic antennas of the same size," said Ian Akyildiz, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in a press release. "We believe that this is just the beginning of a new networking and communications paradigm based on the use of graphene.""
Graphic looks right (Score:3, Informative)
The 10-100 nm dimension is transverse to the surface plasmon; the length of antenna is shown as 1 m. In the same way as the width of the wire you build your radio aerial isn't really relevant to reception but the length is, the 10-100 nm dimension isn't particularly relevant to this little device's behaviour.
There's still a problem of length scales here in that the 0.1-10 THz claimed has much longer wavelengths than this 1 m device -- I don't know what the refractive index (or more strictly, the dielectric) of graphene is but I'd be surprised if it were in the 100-1000 range that is required to do this with traditional plasmonics. But that's the entire point of the article... their models have predicted something that is not expected from the classical electrodynamics that /. readers (think they) remember from 1st year physics and so want to apply to everything that ever goes past. Now if only the university's press office had waited for the research to be published rather than sending out the press release with the vague "the research is scheduled to be reported in the journal IEEE JSAC" we'd actually be able to look at it and learn. I assume I'll see it in a Table of Contents alert in a month or two and actually read it then. Yay. (It's also a very odd choice of journal to publish this sort of work so we may yet find that the journal article has little to do with the press release at all.)