Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
(NHI Nanoblog) Wondering what the heck graphene is? It’s the impetus for this year’s Nobel Prize in physics, awarded this week to professors Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, both of the University of Manchester. It’s yet another promising carbon-based material in the emerging field of nanotechnology. But it’s less well-known than other nanomaterials, such as carbon nanotubes.
The short explanation is this: graphene is a flat form of carbon that’s the thickness of a single atom. It has lots of promise, for everything from transistors to computer memory.
A longer, more graceful description is in this Wired piece, which is well worth reading and includes a bonus gallery of neat pictures of the thin, tough stuff.
Geim and Novoselov are themselves interesting, but the fun fact of the day comes from this story in the Moscow News: Geim was rejected from a Russian university the first time he applied. A nice message of hope for despondent high school students everywhere.