GRAPHENE PANCAKES have been magnified 6,000 times.
Image: University of Manchester
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The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics will be awarded to two research pioneers working on graphene, a material that could have myriad high-tech applications, which they first produced by decidedly low-tech means. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, both of the University of Manchester in England, shared the prize for their work producing and characterizing the material, which is a one-atom-thick layer of carbon resembling a nanoscale chicken wire. The new physics laureates were announced October 5 at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
Novoselov was a postdoctoral associate working with Geim in 2004 when the researchers discovered that they could make atomically thin slabs of carbon by repeatedly cleaving graphite—essentially pencil lead—with adhesive tape. Their 2004 Science paper describing the material and its electrical properties has already been cited more than 3,000 times, according to the Thomson Reuters Web of Science.
"I didn't expect the Nobel Prize this year," said Geim, 51, when the Nobel committee reached him at home by telephone. Geim said that winning the Nobel would not change his outlook, not even for a day—he said he was planning to head into work and finish some papers. "I'll just try to muddle on as before," Geim said. He will, however, muddle on with a bit more cash than before; the prize comes with an award of 10 million Swedish kronor, equal to about $1.5 million U.S. dollars.
The Nobel committee said that Novoselov, 36, is the youngest laureate in physics since 1973, when Brian D. Josephson, then 33, shared in the prize for his work on current flows between two superconductors separated by an insulator—a phenomenon now known as the Josephson effect.
Graphene is transparent, flexible and strong, and it conducts electricity, making it an attractive material for a number of electronics applications. Tantalizingly, electrons move through its two-dimensional structure much more easily than through ordinary conductors, zooming through as if massless. Graphene has already been used to make high-speed transistors, and flexible, durable conductive touchscreens are but one large-scale application that could be in the offing if an effective means of mass production can be developed.
At the Nobel announcement, physicist Per Delsing of the Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden, explained that a hypothetical one-square-meter hammock made out of graphene would be strong enough to support a four-kilogram cat. The hammock itself, just one atom thick, would weigh roughly one milligram—about the same as one of the cat's whiskers.
Thomson Reuters, which turns out annual predictions for the Nobel Prizes, flagged Geim and Novoselov as contenders for the award in 2008. But this year's Nobel Prize is not the first time Geim has been lauded for his work. He shared a 2000 Ig Nobel Prize—a sort of parody of the Nobel Prizes, awarded for amusing or unusual research—with fellow physicist Michael Berry of the University of Bristol in England for their research on levitating a number of objects, including a living frog, with magnets.
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16 Comments
Add CommentGraphene Researchers Geim and Novoselov have made something much, much more important than Einstein's relativity which is well known to be wrong.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDavid Cota, please be fair to Geim and Novoselov,
those two made useful research, relativity is wrong according not only to Sientific American. Pioneer anomalies would not have happened if relativity would have been neglected.
Hartwig Thim, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
David Cota,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiso.k., if this was your point. Well, there has been a break with relativity. 2006 Nobel laureate Smoot had already (in 1977) measured the "New Aether Drift" (pub-lished in Phys.Rev.Lett.), he called his measured pre-ferred frame the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Our Solar System moves at 370km/s wrt the CMB, which is Newton's absolute frame of reference. And look up the March 2009 issue of Scientific American ("Was Einstein Wrong?")
I'm asking this question to educate myself and others. Is Einstein's theory of relativity is wrong, is it still being taught in public school curriculum and the universities? Is there an education filter in America that doesn't allow for better theories to emerge? Can you explain for my edification why relativity is wrong?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisrtaylortitle@aol.com
"I hope this helps convince people that we do not need to keep burning Carbon. We can make nano tubes, composites, diamonds and this stuff is really really neat."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStop being silly. Carbon does not dissappear just because you burn it. It is an element.
It is not easy to explain that in a couple of words, but US based "Natural Philosophy Alliance" (NPA) has many data and discussion points on this in their home page (contact@worldsci.org). Maybe one simple try: light speed is anisotropic on earth as Michelson and Gale have found experimentally using Sagnac loops. The Sagnac Effect itself refutes Special Relativity which predicts light speed isotropy in all inertial frames. GPS functions because Sagnac effect corrections are made.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I'm asking this question to educate myself and others. Is Einstein's theory of relativity is wrong, is it still being taught in public school curriculum and the universities?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRelativity is still on very solid scientific ground indeed.
As I understand, Einstein received the Nobel primarily for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Pioneer anomalies may have been produced by factors other than GR's gravitation being wrong. To the extent that any theory is right, it can be useful. That does not prove its correctness for all conditions.
Newton's Universal Gravitation is still more widely used, generally successfully, despite the widely recognized fact that no 'attractive force' exists.
Perhaps at your school there is some inside information as to why Kepler's rotational curve, derived from observations of the Solar system whose gravitational effects (rotational velocities) are produces by several very specific factors, primarily the central location of 99.8% of its total mass, should be transparently applied to determine the rotational characteristics of highly distributed mass spiral galaxies. IMO, this was a gross error, yet astrophysicists' could only imagine that most of the galaxies' mass must be undetectable dark matter. After all they had used all of the standard equations...
Perhaps you can explain why the Keplerian rotational curves should have ever been expected to apply to spiral galaxies...
So, perhaps there has been some small error in the application of correct theories. Hardly worth considering, huh?
10. eseedhouse 08:42 PM 10/5/10:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyes, relativity is still being taught, many teachers
do not change their courses. I am teaching at my Uni-versity (Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria), why relativity is wrong. I am presenting talks (at IEEE conferences, for example) explaining the errors of relativity. It might take long. Galilei was banned by the pope, and it took the Vatican several hundreds years to take the ban off (in 1969!!!!).
In 1980, I published an article describing a model of one biological structure - the crypt of intestinal epithelium, completely similar to the structure later found in graphene tubes (Pyshnov, M. B., Topological Solution for Cell Proliferation in Intestinal Crypt, J. theor. Biol., 1980, v.87, 189-200). In 2005, Sergei Fedorov and myself published a computer simulation of topological transformations occuring in the model of the crypt (http://www.cell-division-program.com/index.php). Apparently, these works remain largely unknown to physicists, with the exception of one reference to them (www.mpipks-dresden.mpg.de/~coqusy06/SLIDES/vozmediano.pdf), where the structure of the crypt is called "a living curiosity". Only from this reference I learned about graphene.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPublications describing graphene tubes are appearing, repeating the discovery of topological properties found in the model of the crypt. Some of them are adding a topological closure to the graphene tube at one end. Such closure is completely similar to the bottom part of the crypt model. I am not sure, however, that the interdependency between the structure of this closure and the structure of the cylindrical part of the graphene tube is understood in the degree it was shown in my 1980 paper and subsequently in the computer model of 2005.
The crypt model also includes the complex process of replacing dying cells with the new cells appearing by cell division, while graphene is a structure not capable of anything like multiplication of the elements of its structure, the atoms. However, when the formation of defects in the structure of graphene occurs, the explanation of structural transformations found in the crypt model can probably be helpful. To conclude, I find the striking similarities very delightful, and I hope that one day biological structures will receive at least as much attention of the researchers.
Michael Pyshnov
I suggest you investigate how the invalid application of Kepler's laws of planetary motion to spiral galaxies produced the perception of missing mass.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a retired IEEE Computer and Communications societies member, I'd like you to review my own essay, "Mass Distribution Characteristics Invalidate the Galaxy Rotation Problem", posted at:
http://sciencewithoutfiction.com/uploads/Mass_Distribution-_Galaxy_Rotation_Problem.pdf
Just to keep things as simple as possible, isn't it likely that the high speed of electrons flowing through pure carbon most likely the product of carbon's very low atomic weight and therefor the low electrical charge of its nucleus?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCharge carrying electrons flowing between atoms must break their charge bond with the nucleus of the atom they are 'leaving' to bond with the next atom's nucleus. It seems natural that the charge bond being broken would detract from the electron's momentum much less if there were fewer protons and thus a lower charge applied to the passing electron.
I admit that I may not explain in the most appropriately applicable context, but I suspect this is essentially the fundamental effects producing the observed speed of charge traversal.
This would infer a relationship between the atomic weight of all atoms and their speed of charge transfer. If this relationship is somehow unknown in it should be very easily testable...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe have a lot of information to share on regarding this topic on PhysicsForums.com.
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=435072
Thanks!
Mars
I agree, Galilei did not have the correct picture of the Universe.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs far as special relativity is concerned there are many reasons and experiments refuting special relativity, one of those have been published by myself in IEEE Transaction on Instrumentation and Measurements vol.52, No 5, pp. 1660-64, October 2003, H. W. Thim, title: "Absence of the relativistic transverse Doppler shift at microwave frequencies".
jtdwyer: I will review your paper, which looks very interesting!
Yes, especially those students enjoy my lecture very much, who had questions about the logic of relativity for a long time (twin paradoxon). Even the theoretical physicist Angela Merkel, now leading Germany, admitted that she thought she had understood relativity when she was a young Physics student, but could not explain it now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's good that Newton'laws are still working well, and Kepler was describing planetary motion and gravitation very well. We also know that the classical Doppler Effect is correct but the relativistic Doppler formula is wrong. Not really bad as we electrical engineers, the police or airport personnel just use the classical Doppler shift formula for Radar equipments.
As I understand, primarily from Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe and a Cosmological Constant , 1998, Riess, et al, http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9805201v1 , the requirement for dark energy arose primarily from a common misperception in astrophysics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHaving most precisely determined that the most distant galaxies are accelerating away from their observers at a greater rate than nearer galaxies, it was concluded that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
However, those more ancient light emissions indicating greater rates of expansion reflect the expansion rate of the earlier universe. Those precise observations only confirm the expected deceleration of the universe.
This simple interpretation of the observational data is consistent with the second law of thermodynamics and does not require any unidentified new dark energy.
Jim,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is my new Sciam acct. They got upset because I picked on the guy always running web ads on there articles. Instead of dealing with the crap they have managed to remove all of my comments from all of my interactions. I have read Sciam since 1965 and am deeply disappointed that they worried more about my sound off than this idiot posting web ads on almost every article.
I don't think I will keep my subscription going after this year. I am very sad they prefer illegal ads to a consumer that has been faithful for 45 years. Albert Einstein is turning in his grave.