The
decision to start this blog grew somewhat organically from many conversations
my illustrator and I have had about various new discoveries across the realm of science. Our conversations usually build from a shared curiosity and one
of us understanding something better than the other and being willing to
explain it. There is one topic though, where we have continuously butt heads:
graphene. I am always amazed and optimistic about the possibilities that might
come from research into this so-called “wonder material,” while Geoff (who
works in the field of nanotechnology) thinks graphene is the most over-hyped
thing since those people who were in Twilight broke up. This week's discussion is an attempt to share our incessant bickering with you, avid reader. Now let’s get
on with it!
Intro!
So first
off, what is graphene anyway? The average person who doesn’t seek out
science news on a regular basis could be forgiven for never having heard of it.
Right now, it’s a bit of a niche material, but one day it will probably change
your life.
When you
get right down to it, graphene is the world’s first 2-dimensional anything. It is
as thin as thin can be – a single atom thick. To put that in perspective,
aluminum foil is about 193,000 atoms thick. A human hair is between 100,000 and
200,000 atoms in diameter. Graphene, in other words, is crazy thin. It is also
made entirely of carbon, making it something like an infinitely squished
diamond.
Graphene
was discovered, as all great things in science are, by a couple guys screwing
around with lab equipment. One day in 2004, Andrei Geim and Kostya Novoselov, a
pair of Russian researchers working at the University of Manchester, decided to
see what would happen if they took a piece of Scotch tape and used it to peel
layers off of a piece of graphite. They weren’t the first people to do this (Scotch
tape is commonly used by researchers to clean up a piece of graphite before
putting it under a lens), but Geim and Novoselov where the first people to take
it somewhat too far. They peeled and peeled flakes of graphite until they were
left with a sheet only a couple atoms thick. From there, they used scientific
ingenuity to transfer the bits they had left onto a silicon wafer and won
themselves the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010.
Now you might
be wondering why they would get a Nobel prize for that. Sure making the
thinnest thing physically possible is pretty cool. It might even be worthy of
free pints for life at the university pub, but a Nobel Prize? The answer lies in the doors their research opened up for science and technology. They
didn’t just make something one-atom thick, they made it out of pure carbon;
and, as we will see in Part II of this post, carbon is pretty awesome stuff.
Come back tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion... (Geoff is drawing as we speak).
