The secret of making graphene is explained by Dr Jonathan Hare, a physicist turned television presenter. In the video below, he explains just what graphene is, explores a few of its more amazing properties, brings in some quantum weirdness, makes a light run on pencil shavings, and, yes, shows you how to make your own graphene sheet. It’s a packed six minutes:
As you can see, making graphene doesn’t require anything special – just a lot of time and energy. While you’re busy folding and refolding your piece of tape, here’s another video in which Hare gives a lot more background on what graphene is and why it’s important:
Republished from io9
Glenn M
Wednesday, December 8, 2010 at 12:44 PMhmmm, “makes a light run on pencil shavings”
well, really, he had a battery … he could have just stuck his tongue across the PCB tracks – that wouldn’t make it saliva powered.
Steve
Sunday, March 6, 2011 at 10:39 AMGraphene still has mass, which means it is still just as three-dimensional as a basketball in a cardboard box on a seat in a stadium. For example, one square foot of a single layer of graphene would have an observable length, width, and height. The length and width would each be equal to 1 foot, and the height would generally be considered to be the “thickness” of a carbon atom. The van der Waals radius of an atom is the radius of a sphere which approximates the region of space “occupied” by the atom. The van der Waals radius of a carbon atom is 170 picometers, so I believe that makes the thickness of a carbon atom 340pm, or 0.34 nanometers. It IS extremely thin, but still infinitely thicker than a two-and-only-two-dimensional object, which would have a thickness of 0.