Nobel Prize in Physics For Discovery of Graphene

bugsbunnyak writes "The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded for the discovery of graphene to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov. Graphene is a novel one-atom-thick lattice state of carbon which has demonstrated unique quantum mechanical properties. These properties derive in part from the 2-dimensional nature of the material: quantum interactions are constrained to the effectively planar dimension of the lattice. Graphene holds promise for physical applications including touch screens, light cells, and potentially solar panels. Geim becomes the first scientist to achieve a Nobel prize despite earlier winning the highly-coveted Ig Nobel in 2000 for his studies of diamagnetic levitation — also known as The Flying Frog." Slashdot originally mentioned the frog almost exactly 10 years ago.

Comments

My view as someone in the field of graphene

[vsage3]

Geim's original paper on the subject ( http://arxiv.org/ftp/cond-mat/papers/0410/0410550.pdf ) was a real fascination because it was so simple and yet enabled many people to do real research. The original paper uses scotch tape to peel off monolayers of different bulk materials, but only graphene showed anything interesting (in particular, the so-called "field-effect" which is the principle behind CMOS transistors. To be sure, the quality of graphene produced from this method is complete crap compared to more advanced methods used by groups today (chemical vapor deposition of various organic molecules, carbon gettering from metals, epitaxial growth by silicon sublimation from SiC), but an impressive amount of exotic physical phenomena (e.g., quantum hall effect) was seen in what was essentially crap.

No doubt, Geim has probably indirectly gotten thousands of researchers perhaps a billion dollars in funding in less than a decade, but I don't think Geim's contribution was as much physics as it was successfully marketing his research (outsiders like to think of science as being purely meritocratic, but it scientists are still people, and people are susceptible to hype). In my opinion, there are many better physics researchers in the field than Geim himself, but none of them are nearly as good at communication and generating buzz.

In any case, congratulations to him for winning it so soon.