really exciting today nobel prize in
physics today uh the nobel prize in
physics has been awarded to uh two
physics physicists working in the uk in
manchester
uh andre gaim and costiano rosaloff
and there are two things that make it
really unusual
the first thing is it's a nobel prize
that was won
with a piece of seller tape
sticky tape
and the other is
it's the first nobel prize where i've
lost a bet and a cup of tea
yes i know andre guy very well in fact
he was a postdoc
working here in nottingham in the early
90s and i also know costia very well
my colleague mike said that this year's
nobel prize in chemistry would be for
graphene i said be for physics but he
bet me either way that i would buy him a
cup of tea and i've lost
well what what andre and costia had was
the crazy idea of making
a transistor structure out of a single
atomic sheet
this is graphene
it's a sheet of carbon atoms arranged in
hexagons now graphite is the thing
that's inside this so-called lead pencil
it's that it's not lead in there it's
it's it's carbon in the form of of
graphite uh and if we make a mark with a
pencil what we're doing is we're
depositing little sheets atomic sheets
of of carbon on the paper
and one single atomic layer of
graph graphite
is called graphene and this is a
representation but it's only one atom
thick you can see a very large sheet but
very thin very flexible and we can
imagine graphite as just being layer and
layer of this piled upon one upon
another and so what andre and costia did
they
essentially took a lump of graphite
and then got some scotch tape or
sellotape and stuck it on the surface
and then peeled off layers of
of carbon these atomic layers not
perhaps one single layer but maybe 10 or
50 of 100. 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 it's made up of
lots of layers like this stacked one on
top of each other
thousands of millions in this tiny
sample
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
but by repeatedly sticking more
sellotape on they could peel off one
atomic layer after another until
eventually they could see just one
single atomic layer of
these carbon atoms and that was your
graphene 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 sellotape and it
stuck
mine hasn't stuck so i wouldn't get the
nobel prize for that
i was very happy
because they i know them both and they
work in britain so it's great for
britain and wonderful for them so
i should certainly be raising my glass
to them this evening 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
another here you have a single layer of
carbon and this has opened up a huge
range of experiments what uh costia and
andre did in manchester uh was to look
at the electronic properties of graphene
and uh they used what a particular
interest of course it wasn't just that
they discovered the transistor but they
learned a whole lot of
new physics which was really entirely
unexpected
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
this is definitely a nobel prize in
physics rather than chemistry because uh
i think it's fair to say i'm not a
chemist but i think the chemistry of uh
of graphite and graphene are fairly
understood the big surprise was if you
uh make a little transistor out of this
all these interesting prop fundamental
physics properties emerge so i think
it's right that they should have got the
nobel prize for physics
it's interesting that rutherford who had
also been a scientist at manchester got
the nobel prize for chemistry
and he didn't really respect chemists
he's his own man so it was immediately
an equal partnership no he was uh
had a very strong ideas of science and
it was great pleasure and privilege
working with him and uh you know they
they they both have very very clear
ideas of where they want to go to
succeed in that project
it's just remarkable if you well i
remember when they made the first
transistor the patience and dedication
to try and get that just to see this
idea through to a working device was
just incredible and as i've said they're
a pretty small group in manchester and
all these other groups around the world
big groups breathing down their neck but
somehow kostya and andre have been able
to keep ahead of the keep ahead of the
field fantastic