Pioneers Get Close-Up View of Miracle Material Graphene

Physicists who won last year's Nobel Prize for isolating graphene, the world's thinnest material, said Sunday they had devised ways of studying the novel substance at the fundamental level of the electron.

In a study published in the journal Nature Physics, Russian-born physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov said they had detailed interactions between electrons on a sheet of graphene in a bid to understand why the material is so unique.

Graphene comprises just a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb-shaped, hexagonal lattice.

The substance is chemically very simple but extremely strong, conducts electricity, dissipates heat and is transparent. There is a surge of interest in it to replace semiconductors in next-generation computers, touch screens and other electronic gadgets.

The Geim-Novoselov team built a test bed in which extremely high-quality sheets of graphene were suspended in a vacuum in order to get a clear view of how electrons interacted, free from the distortion of electron "scattering."

They found that the electrons moved at very high velocities -- previous research has monitored speeds 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) per second, some 30 times faster than in silicon -- and in a way that mimics photons, or particles of light.

Read more at Discovery News