Many people rely on headphones and earphones for music and audio playback these days. It’s just a convenient way to listen to your tunes, without bothering the people around you. Now, scientists have come up with some cool new earphone tech. Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley have created the first graphene-based earphones ever.
Without any optimization, a single sheet of graphene can provide a frequency response comparable to or better than a pair of commercial Sennheiser earphones.
The researchers used a graphene diaphragm that’s 7mm across and 30 nm thick, which was sandwiched between two silicon dioxide electrodes which cause the diaphragm to vibrate when power is applied. The material is extremely light and very strong – roughly 100 times stronger than steel – thanks to the unique properties of Graphene’s pure carbon structure.
While this prototype pair is unoptimized for playback, with some tweaks they could be. I’m just curious to see how expensive a production version would be.
[via Technology Review via Extreme Tech]
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