Battery Metals

One step forward, two steps back: Precious metals kept up with their trend of slight back-to-back gains and losses on Wednesday. The issue is an uncertain outlook for risk given the drag on everything from Brexit to China trade talks.

After seven-month peaks of above $1,300 an ounce for gold in early January and record highs of above $1,400 in palladium’s spot price last week, both markets have entered into a range this week.

On the New York Mercantile Exchange’s Comex division, the most-active gold futures contract settled up 70 cents, or 0.05%, at $1,290.20 per ounce.

The spot price of gold, or bullion, dipped $1.40, or 0.1%, to $1,283.79 by 2:33 PM ET (19:33 GMT) after trading higher earlier in the day.

Palladium futures on Comex settled up $1.70, or 0.1%, at $1,306.50 per ounce.

The spot price of palladium traded at $1,356 per ounce, up $5.80, or 0.4%. On Thursday, it hit an all-time high of $1,440.35. That makes it the world’s most valuable traded metal now, although gold’s previous record highs were above $1,900 an ounce.

“Worries over the partial U.S. government shutdown, Brexit and China, which should allow gold to get a bid as a safe haven, are being offset somewhat by expectations there will be no Fed rate hikes in the near term, which in turn are positive for stocks,” said George Gero, precious metals analyst at RBC Wealth Management in New York.

The dollar index, a contrarian trade to gold, slipped by 0.2% to 95.76.

In other precious metals on Comex, silver futures rose by 4.8 cents, or 0.3%, to $15.37 per ounce.

Platinum futures rose by $5.70, or 0.7%, to $796.90 per ounce.

In base metals,copper fell 0.5 cent, or 0.2%, to $2.68 per lb.

London aluminium prices slipped on Thursday from near one-month highs hit the session before on expectations that a period of tight supply will soon ease.

FUNDAMENTALS

* London Metal Exchange aluminium slipped by 0.7 percent to $1,896 a tonne by 0117 GMT, trimming a 1.4 percent gain in the previous session that saw prices tip the highest in a month at $1,917.

* Supporting prices, cancelled warrants, or metal earmarked for removal from LME warehouses, have surged in the past 10 days to nearly 400,000 tonnes from 235,000 tonnes in the middle of January, accounting for around one third of the LME’s 1.3 million tonnes of stock. MALSTX-TOTAl

* The Trump administration is expected to lift sanctions on companies linked to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, including Rusal, as soon as Friday. That could mean that aluminium that had previously been caught by sanctions is available to market.

* DOLLAR: Other metals were a touch firmer, finding support from a weaker dollar.

* SHFE: On the Shanghai Futures Exchange, aluminium traded up 0.6 percent at at 13,565 yuan ($1,998) having hit the weakest in more than two years at 13,230 mid-month.

* SHFE stocks: Stocks of most metals have fallen in China over the past few months. A trader said that banks are reluctant to lend to zinc manufacturers ahead of Chinese New Year, which he expects to lengthen a shortage of refined metal.

* TRADE CONCERNS: U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the United States was doing well in trade talks with China.

* CHINA GROWTH: China’s economy can maintain sustainable rates of growth despite global uncertainties, Vice President Wang Qishan said on Wednesday, days after the world’s second-largest economy posted its weakest expansion in nearly three decades.

* DOLLAR: The dollar eased against its peers on Thursday, as concerns over global growth, a U.S. government shutdown and U.S.-Sino trade talks kept a tight lid on the greenback.

Graphene exhibits very different properties in humid conditions, according to researchers from Queen Mary University of London.

Graphene, which is made from carbon and was discovered in 2004, is hailed for many of its extraordinary characteristics including being stronger than steel, more conductive than copper, light, flexible and transparent.

This study, published in the journal Physical Review B, shows that in bi-layer graphene, which is two sheets of one atom thick carbon stacked together, water seeps between the layers in a humid environment.

The properties of graphene significantly depend on how these carbon layers interact with each other and when water enters in between it can modify the interaction.

The researchers found the water forms an atomically thin layer at 22 per cent relative humidity and separates graphene layers at over 50 per cent relative humidity.

This suggests that layered graphene could exhibit very different properties in a humid place such as Manchester, UK, where average relative humidity is over 80 per cent every month of the year, compared to a dry place such as Tucson, Arizona, where relative humidity is 13 per cent on afternoons in May but rises to 65 per cent on January mornings. So, in Tucson the properties will vary according to the time of the year.

Graphene, both layered and single layer, potentially has a huge number of uses but the results of this study could impact how the material can be used in real-life applications.

Lead author Dr. Yiwei Sun, from Queen Mary University of London, said: “The critical points, 22 per cent and 50 per cent relative humidity, are very common conditions in daily life and these points can be easily crossed. Hence, many of the extraordinary properties of graphene could be modified by water in between graphene layers.”

He added: “Some graphene-based devices may function to their full capability in dry places while others may do so in humid places. We suggest all experiments on 2-D materials should in future record the relative humidity.”

The researchers suggest humidity is also likely to have an impact on other layered materials such as boron nitride (sheets made of boron and nitrogen) and Molybdenum disulphide (sheets made of molybdenum and sulphur).

The study was carried out because it was known that graphite, a material also made from carbon, loses its excellent lubricating ability in low humidity conditions, such as aboard aeroplanes at high altitude, which was reported during the Second World War, or in outer space, as reported by NASA in the 1970s.

It was believed that the water in between layers of graphite is crucial to its behaviour and now the same effect has been shown to affect layered graphene.

Aluminium prices hit their highest in nearly a month on Tuesday as investors brushed off weaker economic growth in China to focus on signs of falling production.

Trading volumes were thin ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday, when China, the world’s largest producer of aluminium, will shut for a week.

“We’re heading into softer seasonal flows (but) nearly 3 million tonnes of (Chinese aluminium) smelting capacity has closed and inventories are drawing on a counter-seasonal basis,” Deutsche Bank metals strategist Nick Snowdon said.

But the wider outlook for metals is one of price stagnation, he said, because of a standoff between poor macroeconomic data and upside policy risk such as further stimulus in China.

China’s economy cooled in the fourth quarter, hit by faltering domestic demand and bruising U.S. tariffs, dragging annual growth to its lowest level in nearly three decades in 2018 and pressuring Beijing for more stimulus.

* ALUMINIUM: Three-month aluminium on the London Metal Exchange closed up 1.7 percent at $1,883 a tonne, having hit its strongest since late December.

* CHINA ALUMINIUM: “The question is how long China can maintain (its) recent record-high production rate, given Chinese smelters are currently chalking up average losses equating to $145 per tonne,” Commerzbank said in a note, citing data from Shanghai Metals Market.

* COPPER: Bellwether copper ended down 0.8 percent at $5,935 as global equities slumped after the International Monetary Fund on Monday warned of a darkening growth outlook.

* CHILE COPPER: The union of supervisors at Chilean state miner Codelco’s Gabriela Mistral mine has rejected the company’s final offer for a new collective labour agreement, raising the spectre of a strike in the coming days.

* U.S.-CHINA: The United States will proceed with the formal extradition from Canada of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in a move certain to ratchet up tensions with China.

* BHP: Global miner BHP Group raised its 2019 copper production forecast to between 1.6 million and 1.7 million tonnes.

* NICKEL DEFICIT: The global nickel market deficit narrowed to 4,900 tonnes last November from the previous month’s deficit of 10,600 tonnes.

* OTHER METALS: Lead ended up 0.5 percent at $2,021 a tonne, tin ended down 1.1 percent at $20,425, nickel closed down 1.9 percent at $11,580 while zinc ended down 0.5 percent at $2,576, having hit its highest since mid-December.

Two-dimensional sheets of graphene in the form of ribbons a few tens of nanometers across have unique properties that are highly interesting for use in future electronics. Researchers have now for the first time fully characterised nanoribbons grown in both the two possible configurations on the same wafer with a clear route towards upscaling the production.

Graphene in the form of nanoribbons show so called ballistic transport, which means that the material does not heat up when a current flow through it. This opens up an interesting path towards high speed, low power nanoelectronics. The nanoribbon form may also let graphene behave more like a semiconductor, which is the type of material found in transistors and diodes. The properties of graphene nanoribbons are closely related to the precise structure of the edges of the ribbon. Also, the symmetry of the graphene structure lets the edges take two different configurations, so called zigzag and armchair, depending on the direction of the long respective short edge of the ribbon.

The nanoribbons were grown on a template made of silicon carbide under well controlled conditions and thoroughly characterised by a research team from MAX IV Laboratory, Techniche Universität Chemnitz, Leibniz Universität Hannover, and Linköping University. The template has ridges running in two different crystallographic directions to let both the armchair and zig-zag varieties of graphene nanoribbons form. The result is a predictable growth of high-quality graphene nanoribbons which have a homogeneity over a millimeter scale and a well-controlled edge structure.

One of the new findings is that the researchers were able to show ballistic transport in the bulk of the nanoribbon. This was possible due to extremely challenging four probe experiments performed at a length scale below 100 nm by the group in Chemnitz, says Alexei Zakharov, one of the authors.

The electrical characterization also shows that the resistance is many times higher in the so called armchair configuration of the ribbon, as opposed to the lower resistance zig-zag form obtained. This hints to a possible band gap opening in the armchair nanoribbons, making them semiconducting. The process used for preparing the template for nanoribbon growth is readily scalable. This means that it would work well for development into the large-scale production of graphene nanoribbons needed to make them a good candidate for a future material in the electronics industry.

So far, we have been looking at nanoribbons which are 30-40 nanometers wide. It’s challenging to make nanoribbons that are 10 nanometers or less, but they would have very interesting electrical properties, and there´s a plan to do that. Then we will also study them at the MAXPEEM beamline, says Zakharov.

The measurements performed at the MAXPEEM beamline was done with a technique not requiring X-rays. The beamline will go into its commissioning phase this spring and will start welcoming users this year.

UNIST scientists have developed a new technology that can potentially fabricate highly ordered of graphene quantum dot (GQD). Moreover, it could pave the way for many other types of devices and physical phenomena to be studied.

During the study, scientists demonstrated a novel method for incorporating GQDs, implanted inside the hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) framework. Accordingly, they showed concurrent utilization of in-plane and van der Waals heterostructures to fabricate vertical single electron tunneling transistors.

As of not long ago, GQDs are set up through straightforward chemical exfoliation technique, in which it sheds graphene sheets from bulk graphite. Such a technique has made impossible the generation of GQDs of wanted size. Thus, this not just invites impurities at the edge of GQDs, yet in addition essentially blocks the stream of electrons. This hinders GQDs to show their special optical and electrical properties.

Scientists successfully demonstrated a novel way to remove the impurities at the edge of GQDs and adjusting the size of GQDs, as desired. The growth of in-plane GQD-hBN heterostructure was achieved on a SiO2 substrate covered by an array of platinum (Pt) nanoparticles (NP). Then, this was treated with heat in methane (CH4) gas. As a result, the size of GQDs was decided according to the size of Pt particles, thus generating highly-ordered GQDs inside the matrix of hexagonal boron nitride.

Gwangwoo Kim in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST said, “Since graphene and h-BN are similar in structure, it was possible to grow GQDs inside the matrix of h-BN. The growth of GQDs embedded in the hBN sheet are chemically bonded to BN, thus minimizing impurities.”

Scientists also fabricated arrays of highly-ordered uniform GQDs, and thus was able to adjust their sizes from 7 to 13 nm. They also succeeded in implementing vertical single electron tunneling transistors that minimize impurities to move electrons stably.

Professor Hyeon Suk Shin in the School of Natural Science at UNIST said, “The graphene quantum-dot-based single-electron transistor will be applied to electronic devices that operate through fast information processing at low power.”

The study published in the journal Nature Communications– has been supported by IBS Center for Multidimensional Carbon Materials (CMCM) and the research grant from the Center for Advanced Soft Electronics under the Global Frontier Research Program through the National Research Foundation by the Korean Ministry of Science.