Graphene has a significance that transcends its field of application. It provides the promise of creating sensors that actually image the force fields that make up our environment, as well as, molecular and particle detectors. People see in graphene a dream. It is a possible way to transcend the blindness of our technology and our painful ignorance of our environment.
Today’s technology does allow the construction rudimentary electromagnetic sensors and associated signal processing capability. The “spin filters” in the disk drive of current day laptop computers are only ones that people are generally aware of. This is seen as the starting point of where technology could go. Graphene provides not only a variety of for constructing such spin filters, but allows the possibility of other types of sensors, such as electrostatic, thermodynamic, etc.
Spin filters are constructed out of more primitive devices that can be fabricated from graphene. These include nanodisks, quantum dots, functionalized subwavelength quantum dots, etc. Using valley filters provides a sensor in the electrostatic domain complementary to the electromagnetic ones. Similarly, the techniques of electron counting spectroscopy permit the construction of probes to explore thermodynamic properties, such as thermal gradients and other statistical properties leading to the construction of motors controllable on a subnanometer scale, etc. In summary, graphene provides the new types of devices needed to construct sensors, processors, and a radical new type of technology.
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