Modern tissue engineering strategies combine living cells and scaffold materials to develop biological substitutes that can restore tissue functions. Both natural and synthetic materials have been fabricated for transplantation of stem cells and thei
r specific differentiation into muscles, bones and cartilages. One of the key objectives for bone regeneration therapy to be successful is to direct stem cells proliferation and to accelerate their differentiation in a controlled manner through the use of growth factors and osteogenic inducers. Here we show that graphene provides a promising biocompatible scaffold that does not hamper the proliferation of human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) and accelerates their specific differentiation into bone cells. The differentiation rate is comparable to the one achieved with common growth factors, demonstrating graphenes potential for stem cell research.
We report the first temperature dependent phonon transport measurements in suspended Cu-CVD single layer graphene (SLG) from 15K to 380K using microfabricated suspended devices. The thermal conductance per unit cross section $sigma$/A increases with
temperature and exhibits a peak near T~280K ($pm$10K) due to the Umklapp process. At low temperatures (T<140K), the temperature dependent thermal conductivity scales as ~T^{1.5}, suggesting that the main contribution to thermal conductance arises from flexural acoustic (ZA) phonons in suspended SLG. The $sigma$/A reaches a high value of 1.7$times10^5 T^{1.5}$ W/m^2K, which is approaching the expected ballistic phonon thermal conductance for two-dimensional graphene sheets. Our results not only clarify the ambiguity in the thermal conductance, but also demonstrate the potential of Cu-CVD graphene for heat related applications.
We report on the first systematic study of spin transport in bilayer graphene (BLG) as a function of mobility, minimum conductivity, charge density and temperature. The spin relaxation time $tau_s$ scales inversely with the mobility $mu$ of BLG sampl
es both at room temperature and at low temperature. This indicates the importance of Dyakonov - Perel spin scattering in BLG. Spin relaxation times of up to 2 ns are observed in samples with the lowest mobility. These times are an order of magnitude longer than any values previously reported for single layer graphene (SLG). We discuss the role of intrinsic and extrinsic factors that could lead to the dominance of Dyakonov-Perel spin scattering in BLG. In comparison to SLG, significant changes in the density dependence of $tau_s$ are observed as a function of temperature.
