When one writes with a pencil, thin flakes of graphite are left on a surface. Some of them are only one angstrom thick and can be viewed as individual atomic planes cleaved away from the bulk.

This strictly two dimensional material called graphene was presumed not to exist in the free state and remained undiscovered until the last year. In fact, there exists a whole class of such two-dimensional crystals. The most amazing things about graphene probably is that its electrons move with little scattering over huge (submicron) distances as if they were completely insensitive to the environment only a couple of angstroms away.

Moreover, whereas electronic properties of other materials are commonly described by quasiparticles that obey the Schrödinger equation, electron transport in graphene is different - it is governed by the Dirac equation so that charge carriers in graphene mimic relativistic particles with zero rest mass. The very unusual electronic properties of this material as well as the possibility for its chemical modification make graphene a promising candidate for future electronic applications.

Kostya graduated from the Moscow Physical-Technical University in 1997. Since 2004 he has been working at the University of Manchester, UK, and as a Royal Society Research Fellow since 2007. He has published over 60 peer-refereed research papers including 8 Nature and Science articles and more than a dozen papers in Nature Materials, Physical Review Letters, Nature Physics, Nano Letters, PNAS. Over 60 invited talks at conferences during the last five years.