Carbon Nanotube and Graphene Device Physics (19th of January 2011)

Carbon nanotube and graphene device physics is a book by H.-S. Philip Wong from Stanford University and Deji Akinwande from University of Texas, Austin. The book has been published by Cambridge University Press, and you can find more about it HERE. The cover page of the book (shown above) was taken from the publisher web page. I am sure that you already know how this story develops...

The story began in October 2009 when one of the authors, dr. Akinwande approached me and asked whether I could make an illustration for the cover page of their book. He noted an early version of the image published on Nanotech Now pages. After that, I continued working with the editor for engineering from Cambridge University Press, and that was a great experience. I even got a bit sad that I didn't have similar experience working with publishers in Croatia, but that is how it goes... Our publishers must learn a lot, especially that the authorship is a value. In the whole publishing process in Croatia, the author, the creator of the content is the cheapest merchandise and the one that is easiest to cheat, which happens on a regular basis. The Croatian ministries of culture and science could say a lot in that respect and they could easily regulate at least a part of publishing business where they appear as buyers. Maybe I will write more about that soon.

To not bother you with the unscrupulous Croatian publishers, the story of this post continues yesterday when I picked up a beautiful package from the post, with an even more beautiful content (see below).

I would say that I did my job nicely, and the design of the cover page, i.e. the choice of font and positioning of the title, is also nice. Perhaps they "raised" the image a bit more in magenta that I would do, but it didn't importantly change my illustration (magenta is one of the basic colors in the CMYK color scheme, where C, M, and Y stand for cyan, magenta, and yellow, respectively). In the image below, I show you the original proposition.

The illustration that I prepared is very detailed, and as the "atoms" and "bonds" in the "carbon nanotube" are metal, one can in the sufficiently magnified details containing reflections see hidden elements of the image, including the fact that the nanotube stretches very shortly behind the position of the observer (and that the real, "physically present" observer is not in the scene...). Some of that you can see in the magnified detail shown in the image below.

The space behind the observer can be seen more clearly on a detail magnified in the image below.

I was researching the physics of carbon nanotubes intensely in the period from year 2002 to 2004. I entered the field interested primarily in the possibility to use the materials made of carbon nanotubes as efficient containers of the quantum gases (He and H₂). In case something of that interests you, you can read my most influential/most cited paper from that period >> HERE.

Sometime in that period I noted how powerful are the nanoscale structures when they are magnified several billion times and introduced in a macroscopic realm in that way. One can then view them as architecture. The illustration discussed in this post originated from such experiments.

I can easily imagine children that climb the "nanotube" and jump from it in the sea. A lot of laughter and noise.

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Last updated on 19th of January 2011.