also posted on CHEMCOS blog
One of the best things about science is that it remains faithful either you do it at CERN or at your kitchen. Will Wright, who is one of the hi-tech gurus of Electronic art, has an interesting philosophy regarding his work and to quote him: And so from that, I've always been fascinated with the idea that complexity can come out of such simplicity. Indeed a truth; simple things, especially in science, can exhibit and reveal complexity. This philosophy has again come ture, contemporarily in a new (or should I say old) form of carbon called Graphene.
If you ever wondered how a simple, single layer of carbon atoms can give rise to complex scientific phenomena, then meet the current Princess of Materials: GRAPHENE. Ever since 2004, when Novoselov, Geim and their co workers at University of Machester came up with experimental evidence for two dimensional atomic crystals of carbon [1], there has been a revolution in material science, and what a turn around it has been ! Graphene is a one-atom thick sheet of carbon which stacks up to form graphite (tip of your pencil). This single layer of carbon, if isolated without flaw, then can conduct electricity better than any known material at room temperature. It has also been shown that in certain conditions, it is the strongest material on earth. Apart from being highly conductive and strong, graphene has made name as a simple and ideal test bed to venture various complicated phenomenon like table top QED, room temperature quantum Hall effect, TEM grids for light atoms etc [2,3]. You may wonder what’s so special about graphene ? Currently, the research communities all around the world are unveiling the secrets of this wonder. If you google for papers on graphene, you will observe that all the elite journals online have at least one paper per issue which has something to do with graphene. At present in terms of its property, we can confidently say that graphene has atypical electronic structure compared to other materials, i.e., the electrons in graphene are massless Dirac fermion ( a hi-tech jargon which needs deeper understanding of Quantum mechanics, please see references), which makes it unconventional, and hence exhibits amazing phenomenon. The question now is whether this Princess can replace the aging Queen: Silicon.
The coming time would reveal….
Reference:
Graphene web links:
1. First paper on graphene isolation
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