Graphene is both the thinnest and the strongest material yet discovered. Geim and Novoselov extracted it from ordinary graphite, and used ordinary adhesive tape to obtain a flake of carbon with a thickness of just one atom.
"Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov have shown that carbon in such a flat form has exceptional properties that originate from the remarkable world of quantum physics," says the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
"A vast variety of practical applications now appear possible including the creation of new materials and the manufacture of innovative electronics. Graphene transistors are predicted to be substantially faster than today’s silicon transistors and result in more efficient computers."
A WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES!
The inventors say that graphene holds a world of possibilities in terms of usage.
The science behind the material is quite facinating to say the least. It is very technical, for the average reader, but I will try my best to explain it in simple terms
Graphene is an allotrope of carbon, whose structure is one-atom-thick planar sheets of sp2-bonded carbon atoms that are densely packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice.
The term graphene was coined as a combination of graphite and the suffix -ene by Hanns-Peter Boehm who described single-layer carbon foils in 1962.
Graphene is most easily visualized as an atomic-scale "chicken wire" made of carbon atoms and their bonds. The crystalline or "flake" form of graphite consists of many graphene sheets stacked together.
The carbon-carbon bond length in graphene is about 0.142 nanometers.
Graphene sheets stack to form graphite with an interplanar spacing of 0.335 nm, which means that a stack of three million sheets would be only one millimeter thick. Graphene is the basic structural element of some carbon allotropes including graphite, charcoal, carbon nanotubes and fullerenes. It can also be considered as an indefinitely large aromatic molecule, the limiting case of the family of flat polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2010 was awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov"for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene".
ANTIBACTERIAL PROPERTIES
Oddly enough the Chinese Academy of Sciences has recently found that sheets of graphene oxide are highly effective at killing bacteria such as Escherichia coli. This means graphene could be useful in applications such as hygiene products or packaging that will help keep food fresh for longer periods of time (see: Hu, Wenbing et al. (2010). "Graphene-Based Antibacterial Paper". ACS Nano 4 (7): 4317–4323. doi:10.1021/nn101097v. PMID 20593851 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn101097v).
"It seems the uses of Graphene nanomaterial are limited only by the imagination...", says Phil Jones of Charlotte, N.C. a medical student and researcher.
Jones is looking at the possibilities of graphine in the use of bandaids and a host of other materials which could cut hospital infection rates and help patients.
Robert Tilford
Charlotte, N.C.
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