Prizes & Anniversaries
What an exciting month it is!
First comes the Nobel Prize for graphene discovery for two Russian scientists, Geim and Novoselov. It's easy to understand what graphene is - it's a single layer of carbon, just as in the picture. But even though it's just carbon, it's properties are much different: it is the strongest material ever measured, it has a thermal conductivity more than double that of diamond and has a charge mobility that is among the highest of any semiconductor.How it works: graphite in your pencil is carbon, actually they are layers of carbon one on top of the others. The bond between carbon layers are very weak and you can easily break them with the scotch tape. The layers will stick to the glue and if you repeat the process, you end up separating thinner and thinner pieces, eventually arriving at the single layer.
Ah, almost forgot - price of the final product: several hundreds dollars per gram. That's the way to get rich, especially since they are companies willing to buy TONS of this material (there's this really nice article in Nature Nanotechnology Selling graphene by the ton)
Why would anyone like to buy tons of a material that's so expensive? So, in fact, they are some chemical methods to produce it much cheaper and it's used very often in the macroscopic objects (for instance in polymers composites) to make them stronger, change their electrical or thermal properties and so on..
But the rumor has it that they don't hire girls for post-docs, since, well... they tend to get pregnant.. :s shame on you guys!!
Fullerenes are a bit forgotten nowadays, still they were the first of the carbon nanomaterials, which are such a hit right now.
Buckminsterfullerenes, because that's how they were called by their discoverers, are molecules made of 60 carbon atoms, with a structure of a football (the icosahedral, which are 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons on the surface). The funny name was inspired by the geodesic domes designed by the architect Buckminster Fuller. Now we are all familiar with the shape of a buckyball and it seems almost impossible that it took scientists almost 5 years to measure the shape of it. And during those five years they were papers claiming that C60 molecules were actually planar (including my fav: 'C60: a deflated soccer ball?')
In the end the fullerenes weren't that successful, as it was hoped, they didn't find that many applications as carbon nanotubes or graphene.
Anyway their discoverers were awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996.
So we had a Nobel for buckyballs, then 14 years later for graphene and I'm wondering how the nanotubes could have gone unnoticed!!!
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