Carbon crusade

It’s been proclaimed a ‘wonder material’ that will be the springboard for a new technological revolution. It has earned its discoverers Nobel prizes, formed the foundation for dedicated institutes and, if publicity is to be believed, is set to inveigle itself into every aspect of our lives. Name a superlative property and someone will claim it has it. Graphene has received more hype than a whole series of blockbuster superhero movies.

But graphene is real; and huge research budgets are focusing on it worldwide. For the uninitiated, graphene is a pure form of carbon consisting of a single flat sheet of carbon atoms arranged in hexagons: in effect, a single layer of graphite. It’s often referred to as a two-dimensional material, although, strictly speaking, it isn’t; it’s one atom thick and atoms are not dimensionless.

First isolated at Manchester University in 2003 by Russian-born materials scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, graphene had previously been studied theoretically but was thought to be thermodynamically unstable. Geim proved this was wrong when he took a thin piece of graphite that had been prepared by a student and ‘peeled’ off a sheet of graphene using a piece of adhesive tape.