Andre Geim

Talk title

QED in a Pencil Trace

Abstract

When one writes with a pencil, thin flakes of graphite are left on the surface making a dark trace. Some of these flakes turn out to be only one atom thick and can be viewed as individual atomic planes pulled out from bulk graphite. These planes look like a chicken wire of carbon atoms shown in the picture. Despite being lite - really right before our eyes for centuries, this thinnest possible material in our universe called graphene was presumed not to exist until it was discovered by our group in 2004. How graphene is a rapidly rising star on the horizon of materials science and condensed matter physics, revealing a cornucopia of new physics and potential applications. I will overview our experimental work on graphene concentrating on its exotic electronic properties that are governed by Dirac-like equations rather than the standard Schrödinger equation and speculate about future applications.