The paper has opened up a new research area. It is a large one. We just do not know yet how large. In the paper, our group has shown that there exists a new class of materials—strictly two-dimensional atomic crystals—which can be seen as individual atomic planes pulled out from bulk crystals.

“Imagine a piece of paper but a million times thinner. This is how thick graphene is.”

Especially interesting is graphene, which is a single layer of carbon atoms densely packed in a honeycomb lattice. Graphene is only one atom thick (thinnest possible material ever) but stable under ambient conditions, exhibits very high quality and some truly unique properties. Some of these properties allow one to address the relativistic physics (quantum electrodynamics) in a condensed matter experiment. This is what currently drives up the citation index.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, this was an unexpected discovery. No one expected that such thin materials could possibly exist. But, of course, we were driven to this discovery by previous knowledge about other materials, in particular the fact that carbon nanotubes exist.

Imagine a piece of paper but a million times thinner. This is how thick graphene is. Imagine a material stronger than diamond. This is how strong graphene is. Imagine a material more conducting than copper. This is how conductive graphene is. Imagine a machine that can test the same physics that scientists test in, say, CERN, but small enough to stand on top of your table. Graphene allows this to happen. Sounds like a magic? Indeed: sometimes, even I cannot believe that this is true. Having such a material in hand, one can easily think of many useful things that can eventually come out. As concerns new physics, no one doubts about it already, which is very quick (only two years after our first report).

I jump from one research subject to another every few years. I do not want to study the same stuff "from cradle to coffin," as some academics do. To be able to do this, we often carry out what I call "hit-and-run experiments." Some crazy ideas that should never work and, of course, they don’t in most cases. However, sometimes we find a pearl. There were, let us say, two other pearls before we found this one, but graphene is by far the biggest, scientifically speaking.

This research style may sound appealing but it is very hard psychologically, mentally, physically, and in terms of research grants too. But it is fun. As for obstacles, it was not fun at all to fight with referees. I had more troubles with this paper than with anything else in my life. I was even called names, for example, "Hendrick Schoen" (Schoen was an infamous physicist who specialized in the electric field effect in organic materials but was fired from Bell Labs for falsifying data over a 4-year period) but, fortunately, the second paper on graphene (by the Columbia group) appeared only after a year. Now, after two years, no one doubts any more.

It is a physics paper! These days, physics is not acknowledged even when people use computers or fly in an airplane. So, I am sure that our research will not cause any civil unrest, and no government will fall.

However, speaking seriously, all lights are green that the work will eventually lead to new technologies, so important that they might touch everyone’s life. Some graphene’s partisans say that it can be the next big thing after silicon. I do not know yet. What is more certain is that graphene allows some particle physics and astrophysics ideas to be tested in conceptually simple bench-top experiments rather than in those multibillion dollar machines.