This article was first published in the November 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

A microscopic colonnade like this could soon replace your laptop's energy-guzzling fan. Researchers at Rice University in Texas simulated how heat would flow through this 100-nanometre 3D structure of boron nitride, also known as white graphene, and discovered that it could be used to cool devices.


The reason? The single-atom-thick substance diffuses heat quickly across two-dimensional sheets.

The challenge has been to move the heat vertically, explained lead researcher Rouzbeh Shahsavari. "If you want to send the heat outside a plane to channel it from one layer to another, these materials aren't good," he says. "When you stack sheets of boron nitride, they behave as if they aren't connected."

Shahsavari's idea was to link the sheets with tubes of the same material. He discovered that heat would move horizontally as well as vertically between planes. Also, by changing the length of the tubes and the space between them, it is possible to fine-tune how heat moves across the structure.

Such nanostructures could be useful in electronics, at a time when ever-shrinking devices are making heat management a major problem. "At that scale, if the system becomes too hot, it might quickly degrade the properties and the lifetime of the device," Shahsavari says.

Manufacturing a one-atom structure is expensive, but Shahsavari remains optimistic about the technology's potential. "They could end up in your computer or your iPhone."