{"id":674,"date":"2019-06-09T08:56:27","date_gmt":"2019-06-09T08:56:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pmf.ni.ac.rs\/chemianaissensis\/?p=674"},"modified":"2021-06-29T10:56:27","modified_gmt":"2021-06-29T10:56:27","slug":"the-chronicles-of-carbon-graphene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pmf.ni.ac.rs\/chemianaissensis\/the-chronicles-of-carbon-graphene\/","title":{"rendered":"The Chronicles of Carbon | Graphene"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Like plastics in the twentieth century, graphene is a material that has marked the 21st<\/sup> century. Scientists have theorized about graphene for decades. Now, researchers from around the world are teaming up to discover and learn every bit of information regarded to this supermaterial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Origins<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In the 16th<\/sup> century, a graphite mine was found in Cumberland, England. The mineral appeared to be an incredible material that could be used to forge weapons and tools because the melting-metal temperature didn\u2019t have any effect on it. Later, in the year of 1794, Volta enlisted graphite in the Volta\u2019s list of conductors<\/em>. As a conductor of electricity, graphite was apparently to be considered as a metal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the first half of the twentieth century, Philip Russell Wallace was investigating the properties of graphite<\/a>. He stated that it is composed of layers of the two-dimensional structures, which was later named graphene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Predecessors<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In 1889, Hughes and Chambers claimed a patent<\/a> in which they introduced a method of manufacturing carbon fibers by using water vapor. In the year of 1953, Davis, Slawson, and Rigby used electron microscopy to spot some\u2014larger than 100 angstroms (0.1 nanometers) in thickness\u2014carbon fibers which rose from the action of carbon monoxide on iron oxide at the temperature of 450 Celsius degrees as they described in their paper published in Nature<\/em><\/a>. In 1985, Smalley, Curl, and Kroto discovered fullerene, a sphere-shaped carbon macromolecule with the molecular formula C60<\/sub>. And six years later, a Japanese physicist, Sumio Iijima, used arc-discharge evaporation method to discover helical microtubules of graphitic carbon<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Graphene Today<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Graphene is an allotrope of carbon consisting of sheets that have the thickness of one atom. All carbon atoms are sp2<\/sup><\/em> hybridized and arranged in a honeycomb pattern. Multiple graphene sheets stacked on top of each other are regarded as multi-layer graphene, up to the point where the material becomes graphite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2004, Andre Geim, along with the Post-doc fellow Konstantin Novoselov, studied the properties of graphite and its derivatives. He suggested Novoselov to investigate the graphite remained on the adhesive tape, which is used for polishing graphite samples. Novoselov, then, found single-layered stable graphene, which was previously thought to be impossible to get. Because of the remarkable discovery of a simple and cheap method of obtaining single-layered graphene, in 2010, these two scientists won a Nobel Prize<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Graphene has extraordinary mechanical, optical and electrical properties, and hence this material is widely applicable in technology today. Here is the list of some properties of this amazing material:<\/p>\n\n\n\n