Leopold Infeld Colloquium

Graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice, has attracted a lot of attention since its discovery in 2004. The material with the whole plethora of intriguing properties has been billed as wonder material that could one day determine the future nano-electronics, just replacing the silicon in processors. Actually, a 100 GHz field effect transistor based on graphene sheet has been announced recently.

In this lecture, we present a survey of the graphene properties that lead to intriguing physics (resembling relativistic physics) and make this material so promising candidate for future information technologies. We address the challenges of creating electronic devices built of graphene. We consider electronic structure of monolayer graphene flakes, multilayers of graphene obtained in epitaxial growth process, and recently obtained graphane (i.e., modification of graphene sheet covered with hydrogen atoms), which also is intensively studied.