Key Concepts

• Graphene is a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon that stacks with other such sheets to form graphite—pencil “lead.” Physicists have only recently isolated the material.
• The pure, flawless crystal conducts electricity faster at room temperature than any other substance.
• Engineers envision a range of products made of graphene, such as ultrahigh-speed transistors. Physicists are finding the material enables them to test a theory of exotic phenom­ena previously thought to be observable only in black holes and high-energy particle accelerators.

Consider the humble pencil. It may come as a surprise to learn that the now common writing instrument at one time topped the list of must-have, high-tech gadgets. In fact, the simple pencil was once even banned from export as a strategic military asset. But what is probably more unexpected is the news that every time someone scribes a line with a pencil, the resulting mark includes bits of the hottest new material in physics and nanotechnology: graphene.

Graphene comes from graphite, the “lead” in a pencil: a kind of pure carbon formed from flat, stacked layers of atoms. The tiered structure of graphite was discerned centuries ago, and so it was natural for physicists and materials scientists to try splitting the mineral into its constituent sheets—if only to study a substance whose geometry might turn out to be so elegantly simple. Graphene is the name given to one such sheet. It is made up entirely of carbon atoms bound together in a network of repeating hexagons within a single plane just one atom thick.

   
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