A single plane of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice, graphene was isolated in 2004 with the now-famous Scotch-tape method: University of Manchester physicists Andre Geim, Konstantin Novoselov, and their colleagues peeled away weakly bound layers from bulk graphite with the tape and then gently rubbed those layers onto an oxidized silicon surface. More significantly, they prescribed how to locate with an optical microscope the rare graphene flakes among the multilayer graphite debris.1
Graphene wasn’t new at the time. Organic chemist Hanns-Peter Boehm had synthesized it from graphite oxide in solution nearly half a century earlier, in 1962, and Philip Wallace had calculated its band structure 15 years before that. But through their simple, cheap, and quick method for making high-quality, device-ready crystals, Geim and Novoselov sparked an explosion of experimental and theoretical graphene research. It immediately became possible not only to study the two-dimensional material but also...
