This is
graphine. It's a sheet of carbon atoms
arranged in hexagons, but it's only one
atom thick. You can see a very large
sheet, but very thin, very
flexible. And two physicists, Andre Gime
and
Constantinol in University of Manchester
here in England have been honored for
discovering it. And now I'm going to try
and do their experiment here in front of
you. Never tried it before. Let's see if
it works. It
begins with a piece of
graphite. This is a piece of
carbon which is made up of lots of
layers like this stacked one on top of
each other. Thousands of millions in
this tiny sample. And what G Novasulf
suddenly realized is that they could
peel off layers from the top of this
that were just one atom
thick. So what they did was they took a
piece of sticky tape. I don't know if it
was this brand, but stuff like this. And
they put it on the top and pressed it
down and just pulled it
off. And there sticking on it was a
sheet. I think in this case I've rather
overdone it and taken off several
sheets. And then what they did is they
found another surface and pushed the
thing down and peeled off the cellar
tape and it
stuck. Mine hasn't stuck so I wouldn't
get the Nobel Prize for that. But what
really excited physicists and chemists
was that for the first time you could
have a single
sheet where which was only one atom
thick and so there are bonds that on the
atoms which can interact with other
things. Normally when they're stacked
together all these bonds are interacting
between one layer and another. Here you
have a single layer of carbon and this
has opened up a huge range of
experiments. For example, one of my
colleagues here at Nottingham, Andre
Lebisto, has shown that if you shine
electrons on the sheet of graphine, you
can get it to wrap up and form a ball of
C60. And he told me this morning when I
told him about the Nobel Prize, he's
just shown you can do the other thing.
You can unwrap a bowl of C60 and make
graphine. So the two of them are
interchangeable. And I think it's a
great
prize. It's very nice when somebody's
rewarded because they do an experiment
that everybody can understand. I think
in this case it is right that it was the
Nobel Prize for physics because the real
interest in this material is the way
that the electrons behave in these
layers.
Graphite, the carbon from which the
graphine is made is an electrical
conductor. Conducts electricity. And
when you have a layer one atom thick,
the
properties are much more amanable to
quantum calculations to studying the
physical properties. And it is probably
the physical properties of graphine that
are really exciting to scientists. So I
think it's right that they should have
got the Nobel Prize for physics. It's
interesting that Ratherford, who'd also
been a scientist at Manchester, got the
Nobel Prize for chemistry and he didn't
really respect chemists.