A sheet of carbon can be one atom thick
Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms in a honeycomb. It is strong, an excellent conductor, and it was isolated with adhesive tape.
Established2 min read
Theory had graphene for decades and doubted a free sheet would hold. Geim and Novoselov pulled layers off graphite with ordinary tape, pressed them onto silicon oxide, and found flakes one atom thick by the colour they made on the wafer. Those flakes carried current ballistically and showed a quantum Hall effect at room temperature.
A sheet one atom thick is transparent, flexible, and stronger than steel for its weight. The weight is the point: there is almost no weight. The Nobel Prize in 2010 was for a material that, strictly speaking, has no thickness in the third dimension worth mentioning.
Caveats
- Perfect, metre-scale single crystals are still hard. The existence and the electronic behaviour of the monolayer are not.
Sources
- 1Novoselov K. S. et al.. Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films. Science 306, 2004.