Graphene: carbon in two dimensions

Graphene has been considered by many as a revolutionary material with electronic and structural properties that surpass conventional semiconductors and metals. Due to its superlative qualities, graphene is being considered as the reference material for a post-CMOS technology. Furthermore, graphene is also quite unusual electronically since its electric carriers behave as if they were massless and relativistic, the so-called Dirac particles. Because of its exotic electronic pr...

Graphene is the first example of truly two-dimensional crystals - it's just one layer of carbon atoms. It turns out to be a gapless semiconductor with unique electronic properties resulting from the fact that charge carriers in graphene demonstrate charge-conjugation symmetry between electrons and holes and possess an internal degree of freedom similar to ``chirality'' for ultrarelativistic elementary particles. It provides unexpected bridge between condensed matter physics a...

Graphene research is currently one of the largest fields in condensed matter. Due to its unusual electronic spectrum with Dirac-like quasiparticles, and the fact that it is a unique example of a metallic membrane, graphene has properties that have no match in standard solid state textbooks. In these lecture notes, I discuss some of these properties that are not covered in detail in recent reviews. We study the particular aspects of the physics/chemistry of carbon that influen...

Graphene is a rapidly rising star on the horizon of materials science and condensed matter physics. This strictly two-dimensional material exhibits exceptionally high crystal and electronic quality and, despite its short history, has already revealed a cornucopia of new physics and potential applications, which are briefly discussed here. Whereas one can be certain of the realness of applications only when commercial products appear, graphene no longer requires any further pr...

As the fourth most abundant element in the universe, carbon plays an important role in the physical and chemical evolution of the interstellar medium. Due to its unique property to form three different types of chemical bonds through sp^1, sp^2, and sp^3 hybridizations, carbon can be stabilized in various allotropes, including amorphous carbon, graphite, diamond, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, fullerenes, graphene, and carbon nanotubes.

Discoveries of graphene and graphane possessing unique electronic and magnetic properties offer a bright future for carbon based electronics, with future prospects of superseding silicon in the semiconductor industry.

Single layers of carbon dubbed "graphenes", from which graphite is built, have attracted broad interest in the scientific community because of recent exciting experimental results. Graphene is interesting from a fundamental research perspective, as well as for potential technological applications. Here, we provide a brief overview of recent developments in this field, focusing especially on the electronic properties of graphite. Experimental evidence indicates that high-quali...

The study of graphene, since its discovery around 2004, is possibly the largest and fastest growing field of research in material science, because of its exotic mechanical, thermal, electronic, optical and chemical properties. The studies of graphene have also led to further research in exploring the field of two dimensional (2D) systems in general. For instance, a number of other 2D crystals (not based on carbon, e.g., boronitrene, silicone, graphane, etc.) have been synthes...

This article reviews the basic theoretical aspects of graphene, a one atom thick allotrope of carbon, with unusual two-dimensional Dirac-like electronic excitations. The Dirac electrons can be controlled by application of external electric and magnetic fields, or by altering sample geometry and/or topology. We show that the Dirac electrons behave in unusual ways in tunneling, confinement, and integer quantum Hall effect. We discuss the electronic properties of graphene stacks...

This review on graphene, a one atom thick, two-dimensional sheet of carbon atoms, starts with a general description of the graphene electronic structure as well as a basic experimental toolkit for identifying and handling this material. Owing to the versatility of graphene properties and projected applications, several production techniques are summarized, ranging from the mechanical exfoliation of high quality graphene to the direct growth on carbides or metal substrates and...