We want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening?
Move over, plastic. The new wonder material — apparently the most amazing substance to come out of a laboratory since flubber — might be coming soon to a cellphone, car, airplane, battery, solar panel or computer near you.
Only discovered in 2004, the super substance you possibly have never heard of is obsessing scientists, entrepreneurs and high-tech companies around the world, thanks to a host of amazing properties.
Graphene is the thinnest material in the world, basically a sheet or layer of carbon only one atom in thickness, which has led it to be described as the world’s first two-dimensional material.
It’s transparent, yet it’s a superb conductor of heat and electricity.
It’s stretchy and flexible, yet it’s harder than a diamond and hundreds of times stronger than steel.
And it’s so cheap and easy to make that a smart high school student probably could create a sample of graphene.
Among the few ideas being suggested for potential uses of graphene are flexible electronics, such as a cellphone that you could fold or roll up into a tube or a piece of clothing or a even a potato chip bag that could function as a digital device. Rust-proof metal coatings, medical sensors, seawater desalination, even a potential replacement for silicon in semiconductors are among the ideas being considered as graphene applications.
We have Andre Geim to thank for this.
Geim shared a 2010 Nobel Prize in physics with Konstantin Novoselov for their discovery of graphene, which the two Russian-born scientists created in a laboratory at the University of Manchester in England.
On Thursday evening, May 2, Geim came to the University of Minnesota to explain how.
In a standing-room-only lecture in the Tate Laboratory of Physics on the Minneapolis campus, Geim explained that graphene has been under our noses for centuries — literally right in the smudge that a pencil leaves on a piece of paper.
But it took Geim and Novoselov to come up with the simple but elegant idea of using Scotch tape to peel off thinner and thinner layers of material from a chunk of graphite.
Eventually, they were able to produce the thinnest flake of graphite possible — only an atom thick — which turned out to have the amazing properties described above. Geim and Novoselov called the new material graphene.
Geim said the discovery was the result of what he called “Friday night experiments,” informal brainstorming sessions led by pure curiosity.
It was a previous Friday night experiment that led Geim to develop something called “gecko” tape, which mimics the hairy toes of the lizard, enabling it to walk up a wall. Geim also once levitated a frog in a magnetic field.
“It was one of the hardest experiments I have ever done in my life,” Geim said.
That accomplishment won Geim an IgNobel Prize, a tongue-in-cheek award recognizing offbeat accomplishments in science.
As a result, Geim now has the unique distinction of being the only dual winner of a Nobel and an IgNobel prize.
Richard Chin can be reached at 651-228-5560.