This year's Nobel Prize in Physics recognises metrology as an important future application of graphene as well as NPL's leading role in this field.

One of the first practical uses of graphene will be
as an electrical resistance standard, based on the
unconventional quantum Hall effect

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2010 was awarded jointly to Professor Andre Geim and Dr Konstantin Novoselov, at the University of Manchester, "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene".

A thin flake of ordinary carbon, just one atom thick, lies behind this year's Nobel Prize in Physics. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov have shown that carbon in such a flat form has exceptional properties that originate from the remarkable world of quantum physics. Geim and Novoselov extracted the graphene from a piece of graphite such as is found in ordinary pencils. Using regular adhesive tape they managed to obtain a flake of carbon with a thickness of just one atom. This at a time when many believed it was impossible for such thin crystalline materials to be stable.

There have been over 7,000 papers published to-date on the subject of graphene, and the Nobel Committee chose 44 seminal papers to illustrate the scientific background on the Nobel Prize in Physics 2010. Among these was a paper co-authored by NPL, which appeared in Nature Nanotechnology on the development of a quantum resistance standard based on epitaxial graphene. This means that the Committee recognises metrology as an important future application of graphene as well as the NPL leading role in this field.

Find out more about the development of a quantum resistance standard based on epitaxial graphene

Find out more about NPL's research into Quantum Phenomena

For more information, please contact Alexander Tzalenchuk