CAJ 3 - How was graphene discovered?

Phillip R. Wallace was the first to study graphene. In 1947 he studied graphene as a limiting case for theoretical work on graphite. The earliest TEM (transmission electron microscope) images of few-layer graphite were published by G. Ruess and F. Vogt in 1948.

Gordon Walter Semenoff, David P. DeVincenzo and Eugene J. Mele discovered in 1984 that the electric current could be theoretically carried by effectively massless charge carries in graphene.

S. Mouras is the first to mention the name graphene in 1987.

In 2004 graphene crystals were first isolated by two University of Manchester scientists, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov.

(Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov)

Geim and Novoselov were trying to make graphite as thin as possible using lab equipment. They were struggling for months as they could not  make it thinner than 10,000 layers. After their work the lab surfaces were often covered in graphite and they would use scotch tape to clean it. Most of the time they would just look at the scotch tape to see what was happening to the graphite but would then throw in into the trash can. One day, instead of throwing it away, they decided to look at it under the microscope. They saw transparent pieces of graphite – graphene.

It is a true miracle that Geim and Novoselov continued their research on graphene because they wanted to give up on it since they overheard that other scientist at the university also use Scotch tape to clean graphite before putting it under the lens.

(a TEM image of the porous graphene)

The two scientists were first very surprised by their discovery because their physics intuition told them that this material should not exist since we live in a 3D world and graphene is a 2D material. However, they found a way of transferring the ultra-thin flakes of graphene from Scotch tape to a silicon wafer. After succeeding, they were able to examine the electrical properties of graphene.

Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov were awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics for their work and experiments regarding graphene. They continue to research graphene and other related two dimensional crystal materials.

The Nobel committee was not just blown away by the discovery the two scientist had made but also by the way they did it. The playfulness the two scientists showed while experimenting with graphite was the key to their success. “A playful idea is perfect to start things but then you need a really good scientific intuition that your playful experiment will lead to something, or it will stay as a joke for ever,” Novoselov says. Geim is known in the scientific community for his playful experiments. In 1997 he levitated a frog to demonstrate his work in magnetism.

XOXO A.

P.S. Many great discoveries that changed the world were accidental. It seems that sometimes the only thing standing in the way of a great discovery is a little bit of luck.

Isaac Newton was supposedly sitting in his garden when he discovered gravity. He saw an apple fall straight down from a tree. He wondered why they apple never falls upwards or off to a side. Newton soon discovered that all things fall straight down and that there is an attractive force pulling them down. Twenty years after that the published his theory of gravity.

In 1927 Fleming was experimenting with the properties of staphylococci. Before leaving his laboratory in August for holiday with his family, he had stacked all his cultures of staphylococci on a bench in a corner. After he returned, he noticed that one culture was contaminated with a fungus, and that the colonies of staphylococci immediately surrounding the fungus had been destroyed. Other staphylococci colonies farther away were normal. Fleming then grew the fungus in a pure culture and found that it produced a substance that killed a number of disease-causing bacteria. He identified the mold as being from the Penicillium genus, hence calling it penicillin.