image: A microbullet traveling at supersonic speed is captured in this composite of three timed images as it makes its way toward a suspended sheet of multilayer graphene. Experiments carried out at Rice University show graphene is 10 times better than steel at absorbing the energy of a penetrating projectile. The bubble at left is a polymer film expanding away from the gold substrate that transfers energy from a laser to the microbullet. This material relates to a paper that appeared in the Nov. 28 2014 issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by Jae-Hwang Lee at Rice University in Houston, TX, and colleagues was titled, "Dynamic mechanical behavior of multilayer graphene via supersonic projectile penetration." view more
Credit: [Credit: Thomas Research Group/Rice University]