18. March 2015 15:57
The journal Carbon publishes a special issue devoted to the EuroGRAPHENE programme of the European Science Foundation, with input from the Graphene Flagship.
By Dr Francis Sedgemore *. Science publishing house Elsevier has just published a special issue of the journal Carbon dedicated to the European Science Foundation’s EuroGRAPHENE programme. Several of the editors involved in the new publication are associated with the Graphene Flagship, a consortium of academic and industrial partners, funded in part by the European Commission, which focuses on the need for Europe to address the big scientific and technological challenges through long-term, multidisciplinary R&D efforts.
EuroGRAPHENE was the first Europe-wide initiative dedicated to the study of graphene from both fundamental science and applications perspectives. A precursor to the Graphene Flagship, EuroGRAPHENE was launched at the end of 2010. The programme comprised seven collaborative research projects, with 43 principal investigators and associated partners. Individual projects ranged from graphene-organic transistors and optoelectronic devices to graphene-ferromagnetic junctions and spin-entangled states in hybrid graphene systems.
Work within the EuroGRAPHENE projects was financed from 2010 to 2014 through the national research funding agencies of 14 European countries, most of which are now members of the FLAG-ERA consortium. EuroGRAPHENE as a whole was developed in several large conferences and numerous small workshops, and from the programme emerged a number of active collaborations.
“The EuroGRAPHENE programme was very successful in bringing together a Europe-wide community of researchers in the field of graphene,” says Ana Helman, a Science Officer at the European Science Foundation, and one of the editors of the Carbon special issue. “It also shows how a bottom-up, science-based initiative combined with networking activities can catalyse a large-scale funding effort at the European level, which today is the Graphene Flagship.”
The special issue of Carbon includes only a small selection of the many publications that emerged from EuroGRAPHENE. Taken together, the newly compiled research papers reflect the overall output of the programme, and cover a variety of application areas in which graphene will play a role.
* Dr Francis Sedgemore is the science writer for the Graphene Flagship.
