Picture this: you are thrown into a dingy
room and told "you can't leave until you have created the thinnest material known to man." Not only that, it must also be the strongest,
the best thermal conductor and as good at conducting electricity as copper. I know, it sounds hopeless. But luckily, you know something about nanotechnology. You know, really really tiny devices and materials
that are less than 100 nanometers in size. Of course I don't have to tell you a nanometer
is a billionth of a meter. That's roughly the size of ten atoms. But how do you create something that tiny? It's time to embrace your inner MacGyver. You're gonna need a pencil, some scotch tape
and a healthy dose of elbow grease. A pencil contains not lead but graphite, which
consists of sheets of carbon in a hexagonal lattice. When you write, layers of graphite slide off
the tip of the pencil and stick to the paper. Usually, many layers are stacked on top of
each other but once in a while you get a single layer of carbon atoms. And this is called "graphene" In 2004, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov
created graphene using nothing but graphite and scotch tape. They placed a graphite flake onto the tape,
folded it in two and then cleaved the flake in half. They repeated this procedure a number of times
and then studied the resulting fragments. To their astonishment they found some of the
pieces were only a single atom thick. This was particularly unexpected because it
was thought a single layer of graphite would not be chemically stable, especially at room
temperature. Graphene conducts electrons faster than any
other substance at room temperature. This is because of the extraordinarily high
quality of the graphene lattice. Scientists are yet to find a single atom out
of place in graphene. Since the electrons aren't scattered by defects
in the lattice, they go so fast that Einstein's relativity must be used to understand their
motion. And this perfect lattice is created by the
very strong yet flexible bonds between carbon atoms -- making the substance bendable but
harder than diamond. Graphene in incredibly strong -- if you could
balance an elephant on a pencil and support the pencil on graphene, the graphene wouldn't
break. Of course the pencil would. For their discovery, Geim and Novoselov were
awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 2010. And this is only the beginning for Graphene. Scientists are hard at work exploiting its
unique properties to create thin, transparent, flexible touch screens,
Smaller, faster, more energy efficient computers Tough composite materials
And more efficient solar cells And now consider this is only one aspect of
nanotechnology, so in order to think big you need first consider the very small.
