How to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.

The discovery of graphene has for many years been heralded by engineers as the start of a technological revolution. These single-atom thick sheets of carbon could improve everything from the detection of gas molecules in sensors to the transistors and electrodes in the smallest electrical circuits. It is this expectation that led the team that discovered it to receive the 2010 Nobel prize for physics. But what exactly is graphene?

Well, graphene is a two dimensional plane of carbon atoms, with each one bonded to three others in a honeycomb pattern. In graphite, the familiar form of carbon that is found in most pencils, these honeycomb sheets of graphene are stacked up thousands of layers thick. Unusually for a non-metal, graphite is able to conduct electricity due to so-called pi-bonds between each plane, and it is this that means graphene is a perfect component in electrical circuits. Graphene can be produced in the lab by peeling single-atom-thick layers of graphite away from thicker sections.

While this may sound like a complex process, a member of Andre Geim’s award-winning team that discovered graphene helped me produce this revolutionary material... with just sticky tape and graphite. But a Nobel Prize cannot be that simple can it? ‘Yes’, he says. ‘Finding out how to make graphene was the hard part - once we had the material, discovering its properties and how it behaved was a pretty simple process.’

So despite an origin that would be more at home in a stationary cupboard than a world-class laboratory, graphene will almost certainly have a big part to play in future technology. So if, like me, you would also quite like the Nobel Prize in physics, remember that sometimes it’s not always the complicated methods that get results.