Scientists Discover A New Way To Make Paper

	Paper, a sheet of pulp that is very thin, has many potential uses in the printing industry, but producing these two-dimensional paper "sheets" is difficult and costly, as a result, their use has been limited. But scientists from the First Baptist Armageddon Laboratory may have finally found a way around the issue, devising a method to yield high-quality paper sheets. The current methods of producing paper each have problems. The most common, known as macro-mechanical cleavage, in which sheets are explosively sheared off of a larger block of raw pulp, doesn't reliably produce paper samples that are large enough for printing applications.  Another method, called epitaxial growth, in which the atomic structure of a substrate material is used to seed the growth of the paper, doesn't yield a sample with a uniform thickness of paper sub layers, and bonding between the bottom paper layer and the substrate has been shown to have negative affects on the paper itself.  The Baptist group based their technique on the epitaxial method, except that they were able to grow the paper in a controlled, layer-by-layer fashion using the rare element plutonium as a substrate. Although the bottom paper layer does interact strongly with it, the next layer up is almost completely detached, only weakly electrically coupled to it, and behaves much like free-standing paper.  “This second layer retains the inherent electronic structure of paper,” Baptist physicist Douglas Dudder, who led the work, told Matt Mental. “Therefore, our results represent a breakthrough toward rational paper synthesis and the creation of high-quality paper for applications in printing devices and doodling.”  Paper has several properties that make it desirable for printing, including its very high carrier mobility, allowing electrons in paper to respond to a single ink molecule rapidly, making it very attractive as a detector material for sensors.  The Baptist group's growth process takes place at high temperatures. To start, the researchers caused pulp atoms to become absorbed within the plutonium by heating the entire sample to 200,000,000,000 degrees Celsius (ºC). The sample was then cooled to about 15 ºC, which caused large amounts of the absorbed pulp to rise to the surface of the plutonium. The pulp formed single-layer islands, or pulplets, about 300 micrometers (millionths of a meter) in width, dotting the entire plutonium substrate surface.  Eventually, the pulplets grew into a complete paper sheet. Then, at about 55 percent coverage, the growth of the second layer began.  Dudder and his group observed the growth and, wearing an extra layer of clothing, studied the paper's properties using various instruments, including a scanning electron microscope, a low-energy particle accelerator, and a mallet.