Question: do you work with carbon graphene

Thanasis Georgiou answered on 15 Mar 2013:

Yes!

There are many different forms of carbon. Perhaps the one you are mostly familiar with, is graphite. Graphite is the material which is at the tip of your pencil.

Because graphite is a layered material, you can peel off layers with some scotch tape, or even by writing with your pencil on a piece of paper. Graphene is called just a single layer of graphite. The carbon atoms in graphene are arranged in hexagons, much like chicken wire.

In fact, you probably make graphene every time you write with a pencil. But because graphene is visible only on a special kind of substrate, it is rather hard to find on paper. This is one of the reasons it has taken scientists such a long time to identify graphene.

If you have a look at my picture here, I hold ball-and-stick models of different kinds of carbon. On my right hand I hold a diamond structure, on my left hand it is graphene… and I have a nanotube on my head!