A material that ought
not to exist: Nobel 2010
Helena
Dodziuk
©
Helena Dodziuk
hdodziuk@gmail.com
Rarely, the Nobel Prize in physics evokes such a keen interest
among chemists as did honoring graphene in 20101. More than 70 years
ago, Landau and Peierls found that strictly
two-dimensional crystals are thermodynamically unstable and cannot exist.
Afterwards experimental investigations of the properties of thin films seemed
to confirm this. Obtaining graphene and other isolated high quality 2D crystals
in 2004 by Andre Geim, Novoselov
and collaborators2 was possible because they were obtained either
from a three-dimensional crystal or produced on a support. In such cases,
generally one deals not with one but with a greater number of layers. It is believed
that 10 layers of graphene create a three-dimensional crystal structure of
graphite. The history of this discovery is vividly described in an interview (https://sciencewatch.com./inter/aut/2008/08-aug/08augSWGeim/). To obtain graphene
flakes Geim, Novoselov and
coworkers originally used Scotch tape
Fig. 1. Graphene layer made of carbon atoms (left)
and graphite built of the graphene layers (right). © Wikipedia.
(definitely, not a high-tech method). Producing high quality
large graphene monolayers vital for applications was not possible for long
time. Recently Polish researchers patented a method enabling this3. The
prize was awarded for "groundbreaking experiments with the two-dimensional
material graphene" that has amazing properties. It is the first genuinely
two-dimensional rather than three-dimensional material with the greatest
surface area to weight ratio, the highest stiffness and the tensile strength
much higher than that of steel. At the same time it is transparent over a wide
range of wavelengths, has high electrical conductivity (the resistance is 31
ohm m-2) and exhibits quantum Hall effect4,5.
Electrons in graphene behave in a unique way: in the conventional solid-state
physics they are described by the Schrödinger equation while in graphene they
mimic relativistic particles described by the Dirac equation, because they
interact with periodic honeycomb network of graphene.
A few words about the Nobel Prize winners:
Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov.
A great deal is known about Geim. He was a Russian
German, his ancestors were held in Gulag camps; he was a victim of
anti-Semitism (he suspected that the cause was his Jewish sounding name, not
having a Jewish great-grandmother). His parents and brother with his family
immigrated to Germany, where they reverted to the German version of their name
Heim. Geim became bilingual in English in a special
high school where he also developed a passion for science. He passed twice
entrance examinations to the elite MIFI (Moscow Engineering Physics Institute)
but was not admitted. He succeeded only when he applied to another prestigious
institution Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT). MIPT was a
teaching institution of the highest caliber: lectures there were given by Nobel
Prize winners and several of its students won the Prize later. It was nicknamed
the “Russian MIT”. Geim received his PhD in Moscow,
but after three post-doctoral internships in Western Europe (he is a citizen of
the Netherlands) settled in Britain, where he brought to his group his earlier
informal student Novoselov before the latter defended
his PhD. Of more than 150 works by Geim, 14 were
published in Nature and Science, three of his papers
have been cited over 1000 times and 25 - more than 100 times. As rated by ScienceWatch, Geim launched two
new areas of research: graphene and gecko tape. The latter, a tape prepared on
the basis of biomimetics, takes advantage of the
method used by gecko lizard to walk on the ceiling. Another achievement of Geim was obtaining, together with M. Berry, in 2001 the Ig
Nobel Prize for his research on the levitation of a frog as a diamagnetic body
in magnetic field6. It is worth noting that Geim
is the only scientist who won both the Nobel and Ig Noble awards.
Fig. 2. A live frog levitating as a diamagnetic body in magnetic field.
© Wikipedia
Geim cannot complain about
the lack of imagination. In 2001, he made his hamster Tisha a co-author of a
publication7.
Geim's wife, Irina Grigor'eva, is an acknowledged scientist on her own and his
collaborator.
As a Pole, I would like to mention that there
is a Polish link in the Geim family.
His great grandfather, a German nobleman Karl Ziegler took part in the 1863
uprising for Polish independence (at the time Poland was partitioned between
Russia, Prussia and Austro-Hungarian empire). He was
deported to Siberia for his involvement on the Polish side.
(1) Geim, A. K.; Novoselov, K. S. Nature Mat. 2007, 6, 183-191.
(2) Geim, A. K.; Novoselov, K. S.; Morozov, S. V.; Jiang, D.; Zhang, Y.; Dubonos,
S. V.; Grigorieva, I. V.; Firsov,
A. A. Science 2004, 306 no. 5696,
666-669.
(3) https://scienceinpoland.pap.pl/en/news/news,409234,polish-graphene-production-method-with-us-and-the-eu-patents.html
(4) Geim, A. K.; Novoselov, K. S.; Morozov, S. V.; Jiang, D.; Katsnelson,
M. I.; Grigorieva, I. V.; Dubonos,
S. V.; Firsov, A. A. Nature 2005, 438, 197-200.
(5) Zhang, Y.;
Tan, Y.-W.; Stormer, H. L.; Kim, P. Nature 2005, 438, 201-204.
(6) Geim, A. K.; Berry, M. V. Eur. J. Phys. 2000, 18, 307-313.
(7) Geim, A. K.; Tisha, H. A. M. S. t. Physica B: Condensed Matter 2001,
294-295, 736–739.