Nature Photon. doi:10.1038/nphoton.2010.40 (2010)

Physicists and engineers are excited about graphene — a single layer of carbon atoms — because of its electrical and light-conducting properties. Thomas Mueller, Fengnian Xia and Phaedon Avouris at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, have used graphene to build a device that detects light and converts it into an electrical signal.

Their fast photodetector could pick up light pulses with a wavelength of 1.55 micrometres and introduced no errors in data transmission in a 10-gigabit-per-second optical data link. The authors say that because graphene photodetectors can operate at high speeds and are sensitive to a range of wavelengths, they could have applications in fields such as communications and remote sensing.