October 7, 2010

Nobel Prize for physics with Dutch flavour

Filed under: General,Science by Orangemaster @ 1:09 pm

And we’re back with a Nobel Prize winning edition of ‘Zoek de Nederlander’ (’Find the Dutch person’), with Russian-born Dutch physicist André Konstantinovich Geim, co-winner of these year’s Nobel Prize for Physics and his partner, Konstantin Sergeevich Novoselov, a Russian-British physicist. Geim is happy to have a ‘Western’ passport having chucked his Russian nationality like mouldy bread after years of frustration, while Novoselov has his reasons for enjoy dual citizenship. Either way, both these men were able to make their dream come true and future generations will surely be able to enjoy their discovery.

They were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics this year “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.” Surf the net and you’ll find cool videos and explanations with magnetized frogs and graphite pencils.

This material called ‘graphene’ was long thought to be unstable, as it is only one atom thick.” Geim and Novoselov used scotch tape to drop graphene, a single layer of graphite onto a piece of silicon, and the rest is history.

(Links: rnw.nl, montrealgazette)

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