Last night, Russian physics Nobel laureate Kostya Novoselov delivered the annual Kohn Award Lecture at Imperial College London, where he presented his vision for the future of two-dimensional materials. Novoselov, co-discoverer of graphene – the single atom thick chicken-wire-esque allotrope of carbon – told a packed lecture theatre that graphene could revolutionise the telecommunications and electronics industries.
With the election results in Russia just in and Vladimir Putin once more prime minister, Novoselov made an effort to keep away from politics, but did perhaps nail his colours to the mast when laying out what makes graphene so special. When he talked about conventional semiconductors he compared them to Russia and North Korea, describing them as one party states, where the border between the two isn’t very porous to movement – for this analogy the movement of electrons and holes. Graphene, by contrast, was compared to the US, where each state can be either Republican or Democrat – electrons or holes – but they can move freely between state borders.
Novoselov said that the future for graphene is likely to lie with combining it with other two-dimensional materials like boron nitride, molybdenum disulfide, magnesium diboride and fluorographene. At Novoselov’s home in Manchester University, they’re already building sandwich structures of these compounds with the hope of building materials with unique properties. Novoselov says that they could have a huge range of uses from solar cells to LCD screen to touchscreen technology. But he predicts that the killer app for these materials is still out there waiting to be discovered – these materials will be more than just another replacement for other semiconductors. To find unique uses for these materials he says we’ll have to think outside the box.
Patrick Walter
