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Nobel news encourages UB spinoff

By George Pyle
NEWS BUSINESS REPORTER
October 5, 2010, 10:51 PM

A University at Buffalo spinoff company that already has won more than $600,000 in state and federal grants to develop an ultra-thin carbon material for industrial uses might find even more interest now that the scientists who first isolated the substance have won the Nobel Prize in physics.

"It's great news," said Sarbajit Banerjee, the UB chemist who leads a team that has been developing means to commercialize a substance called graphene.

"It's almost like hitting the lottery."

Graphene, a form of carbon, consists of molecules laid out in a hexagon pattern only one atom thick. In addition to being one of the strongest substances known, which make it potentially useful for military and construction applications, it also is thought to have properties that could revolutionize such devices as computer chips, television screens and solar cells.

Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, the two Russian-born physicists credited with isolating the substance, were awarded the Nobel Prize on Tuesday.
Graphene Devices, a Niagara Falls-based start-up, was launched last year to commercialize a process developed by Banerjee and graduate students Vincent Lee, Luisa Whittaker, Robert Dennis and Brian Schultz.

Robert Anstey, the company's founder and chief executive officer, said Tuesday that soon after the Nobel announcement, companies that previously expressed mild interest in Graphene Devices products began asking for another meeting.

Anstey, an attorney and Western New York native who returned to the Buffalo area last year, said his company, which has been struggling to interest customers in a product that few understood, now will have an edge on other companies that want to market graphene.

"It's very hard starting a new business based on a novel technology that not many people know about," Anstey said. "There's going to be a lot of people chase it afterwards, but we are already ahead of them."

Banerjee said that graphene had been theoretically predicted for many years but that papers published by Geim and Novoselov in 2004 and 2005 were the first examples of anyone actually producing it in a lab. They accomplished the task by removing thin layers of graphite, the material usually called lead in pencils, with Scotch tape.

"People had been trying it for years with all kinds of million-dollar machines," Banerjee said. "They did it with a roll of tape."

"It has all the potential to change your life in the same way that plastics did," Geim told the Associated Press on Tuesday. "It is really exciting."

Geim, 51, is a Dutch national, while Novoselov, 36, holds both British and Russian citizenship. They worked together in the Netherlands before moving to Britain's University of Manchester, where they reported isolating graphene in 2004.

Banerjee read about graphene and its theoretical applications, and began to work on it in his UB lab.

"I thought, there's got to be an easier way," he said.

The way he developed has enough promise to have won grants from the Army, Navy, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and the UB Center for Advanced Biomedical and Bioengineering Technology.

The state authority is interested in how graphene can provide a better alternative to conducting electricity away from solar cells to electronic displays. The Navy thinks it has promise in making stronger and lighter windshields and windows for fighter aircraft, and the Army is interested in making body armor out of a substance that has been shown to be not only very strong, but also very light.

The uses that Graphene Devices and other developers will develop for the material will start with its strength and light weight, Banerjee said.

"The initial applications are going to be pretty mundane, buildings and materials, not very high-tech," he said. "The more high-brow quantum computing applications, that will take a while."

Banerjee said his team at UB is still working out how best to produce graphene in large quantities with uniform quality. They also are working out the best ways to apply the material to other materials more traditionally used in electronics.

"We have to figure out how it talks to other materials, such as copper and nickel," he said.

Graphene Devices already has resulted in some $150,000 for UB, which has licensed the process Banerjee developed at the school in exchange for an equity stake in the business. The income is funding continuing research by Banerjee and UB scientists Mark Swihart and Javid Rzayev.