Member-only story
A reviewer of my near-future science fiction thriller series recently claimed that the premise behind the story was “far-fetched”. All seven books contain a thread regarding the discovery of a mineral that can multiply energy. Although I gave it a suitably sci-fi sounding name, it was actually based on a scientific paper published in Nano Letters in 2015 by JC Johannsen and colleagues.
These respected scientists wrote extensively about their promising findings using ‘doped’ graphene. The term doping, in a chemical sense, simply means to add or subtract electrons at a molecular level. Using a complex laser system and an equally convoluted detection platform, Johannsen found that for every photon which hit a specific region of the doped graphene, two electrons were excited enough to create a charge.
Now, of course, we are talking about tiny fractions of barely detectable energy at this stage, but imagine if they can find a way to scale this for use in everyday applications. Graphene is cheap, relatively easy to produce and is made of pure carbon, an abundant natural element.
Those scientists are already making plans to develop high efficiency photovoltaic solar cells. It is surely not too much of a leap to stack multiple layers of graphene in order to exponentially multiply a tiny stream of photons into a vast amount of…