It was a playful experiment with sticky tape that helped win researchers at the UK-based University of Manchester, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, a Nobel Prize for Physics. By placing adhesive tape on a lump of bulk graphite, the pair managed to rip-off thin flakes of carbon. In the beginning, they got flakes consisting of many layers of graphite, but as they repeated the process, the flakes got thinner until they were left with a material that, in 2004, they characterised as graphene; a tightly packed layer of carbon atoms that are bonded together in a hexagonal, honeycomb lattice.
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