Advancing Screen Technology Through the Discovery and Use of Graphene

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Through a personal intrigue in 2002 physicist Andre K. Geim and a new Phd student were working on a late night project to discover how thin a sample of graphite they could extract from rocks. First using tape to clean dust and small debris from the rocks, they would polish the rocks down and measure them. Noticing that small flakes of graphite on the tape were actually thinner than anything they had previously measured, they shifted their focus to the remnants of graphite on the tape. A young physicist by the name of Kostya Novoselov then stepped into study the thin layers of graphite on the tape. By studying these flakes in great detail they were able to measure the properties of graphite for the first time. Exploring the properties of this new structure called graphene, set off a race of discovery leading many scientists and developers to put full interest into the studies. Graphene, a 2-dimensional, honey comb shaped, crystalline allotrope of carbon has many promising attributes that have the potential to thrust technology forward into the next evolution of electronics. In 2010 Geim and Novoselov received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their exhaustive work and discovery in the working properties of graphite and the advancement of graphene.
Geim and Novoselov may have for the first time measured the properties of graphene but they did not however discover the crystalline structure. That credit would be given to P.R. Wallace who in 1947 first explored the theory of graphene and propelled the understanding of the electrical properties of 3D graphite. In 1948 graphene materials just a few layers thick were observed with a Transmission Electron Microscope or TEM, by G. Ruess and F. Vogt. In 1962 Hoffman and his colleagues “isolat...

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