1) GRAPHENE

 A hexagonal carbon lattice that's only a single atom thick. That's what a sheet of graphene is, arguably the most revolutionary material to be developed and utilized in the 21st century. It is the basic structural element of carbon nanotubes themselves, and applications are growing continuously. Currently a multimillion dollar industry, graphene is expected to grow into a multibillion dollar industry in mere decades.

In proportion to its thickness, it is the strongest material known, is an extraordinary conductor of both heat and electricity, and is nearly 100% transparent to light. The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for groundbreaking experiments involving graphene, and the commercial applications have only been growing. To date, graphene is the thinnest material known, and the mere six year gap between Geim and Novoselov's work and their Nobel award is one of the shortest in the history of physics.

Graphene, in its ideal configuration, is a defect-free network of carbon atoms bound into a... [+] perfectly hexagonal arrangement. It can be viewed as an infinite array of aromatic molecules.






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