The novel material graphene and its technological applications are studied at the Vienna University of Technology. Now scientists have succeeded in combining graphene light detectors with semiconductor chips. The light signal arrives throuth a waveguide (left), in the 2 micrometer wide graphene sheet, electrical current is generated.Graphene – a two dimensional sheet made of carbon atoms – can convert light into electrical current. Today, most information is transmitted by light – for example in optical fibres. Computer chips, however, work electronically. Somewhere between the optical data highway and the electronic chips, photons have to be converted into electrons using light-detectors. Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology have now managed to combine a graphene photodetector with a standard silicon chip. It can transform light of all important frequencies used in telecommunications into electrical signals. The scientific results have now been published in the journal “Nature Photonics”. Computing Power Made of Carbon? Both academia and the industry have high hopes for graphene. The material, which consists of a single layer of hexagonally arranged carbon atoms, has extraordinary properties. Two years ago, the team around Thomas Müller (Institute of Photonics, Vienna University of Technology) demonstrated that graphene is ideally suited to turn

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