Geim, Sir Andre Konstantinovich

Geim, Sir Andre Konstantinovich,

1958–, Russian-born Dutch physicist, Ph.D. Russian Academy of Sciences, 1987. He was a professor at the Univ. of Nijmegen in the Netherlands from 1994 to 2001, when he joined the faculty at the Univ. of Manchester, England. Geim shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics with Konstantin NovoselovNovoselov, Sir Konstantin Sergeevich,
1974–, Russian-British physicist, Ph.D. Univ. of Nijmegen, Netherlands, 2004. He has been a research associate at the Univ. of Manchester, England, since 2001.
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 for groundbreaking experiments regarding graphenegraphene,
virtually transparent, highly conductive carbon material in which the atoms are organized into a honeycomblike arrangement and form a thin sheet that is one atom thick.
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, an carbon material with a honeycomblike structure that is one atom thick. It was long known that graphitegraphite
, an allotropic form of carbon, known also as plumbago and black lead. It is dark gray or black, crystalline (often in the form of slippery scales), greasy, and soft, with a metallic luster.
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, which is found in the lead in ordinary pencils, had a tiered structure, but attempts to break it down into its constituent sheets had resulted in thin sheets of graphite but not graphene. In 2004 Novoselov and Geim successfully made graphene by sticking a flake of graphite debris onto adhesive tape, folding the tape over the flake and pulling it apart, cutting the flake in two. They repeated the process until they had a sheet just one atom thick.