"Brown Bag Lunch" Seminar Series Special Guest Prof. em. Juan Mosig

Prof. em. Juan Mosig of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) visited the IT'IS Foundation on Thursday, March 1. He was a guest speaker in the Brown Bag Lunch Seminar series with a talk on "Graphene-Based Terahertz Antennas and Related Devices."

Graphene – derived from graphite, the type of carbon used in pencil lead – is a two-dimensional sheet of carbon atoms arranged in hexagonal arrays a single atom thick. Although very thin, the material is incredibly strong and superbly conducting. Prof. Mosig described how graphene's unusual physical properties may allow it to be implemented to bridge the "terahertz gap", a frequency range of the electromagnetic spectrum (between the radiofrequency and infrared bands) for which there are currently no practical technological uses. The ability to harness radiation in the terahertz band could potentially be useful in applications ranging from communications to imaging to security to next-generation batteries.

Prof. Mosig's group is a partner in the Graphene Flagship research initiative, one of the European Commission's Future and Emerging Technology (FET) Flagships that support multidisciplinary research and development efforts to address the biggest scientific and technological challenges of our age. The Graphene Flagship, launched in 2013, is a consortium made up of more than 150 academic and industrial research groups from 23 countries, coordinated by Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. The project has a budget of €1 billion for 10 years, with the ambitious goal to midwife the transition of graphene from purely academic research to practical uses in European society.

Many thanks to Prof. Mosig for his fascinating presentation!

From left, Pedro Crespo-Valero (Senior Software Developer), Nik Chavannes (Project Leader, Computational Techniques), Juan Mosig, and Niels Kuster (IT'IS founding director)