Graphene: The Carbon-Based ‘Wonder Material’

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You may not have been aware, but this week is Graphene Week 2015, which marks a yearly week-long conference at the University of Manchester based around the emerging science and technological applications of graphene. This seemed as good a time as any to take a look at graphene: what it is, why some scientists are excited by its potential, and how it might make its way to your hands in the near future.

Even if you’ve not got a particularly scientific background, you’ve likely at least heard of graphene. Currently, it seems like not a week goes by without a new scientific study on graphene being published, or a new article coming out espousing its potential applications. It might seem hard to believe that graphene itself was only isolated just over a decade ago, back in 2003, by two scientists at the University of Manchester: Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov. The method of isolation was somewhat rudimentary: they peeled layers off of graphite, a form of carbon, using sellotape, and kept peeling layers away until they were left with graphene.

The paper in which they published their results was rejected twice by the journal Nature before publication. Previously, scientists had thought it would be impossible to isolate a stable two-dimensional structure. Six years after publishing the paper, Geim and Novoselov won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their findings. 

At this point, we should look in more detail at what exactly graphene is. Graphite, the form of carbon most commonly found in the form of pencil leads, essentially has a structure consisting of many stacked layers of graphene. Graphene is the name used to refer to a single atom-thick layer of carbon atoms, bonded together in a hexagonal lattice patter that looks similar to a flat honeycomb, but which is a million times thinner than a piece of paper.

Of course, we’ve known about graphite for centuries, and even before graphene’s isolation in 2003, scientists had suspected that isolating single layers of graphene could be possible – but until that point, they hadn’t managed it. You might think that making graphene would be quite simple, considering the researchers at the University of Manchester were able to do it using sellotape, but mass-producing it is another matter. Producing high quality graphene in large amounts is a challenge that scientists are still working on solving. Whilst success has been announced several times, more cost-effective methods are still required.

This article was originally published by Compound Interest. For read the full version of this article, please visit Compound Interest/Graphene.