Graphene: Exploring carbon flatland

In Edwin Abbott's 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, the narrator (a square, of course) leads the reader through some of the special features of two dimensions. As the geometric characters in the story come to learn, dimension matters - a lesson that has not been lost on 20th- and 21st-century physicists. Although we can readily imagine a world with fewer or more dimensions and describe it mathematically, it seems at first glance that for natural phenomena we are stuck with three spatial dimensions and one time dimension. Not so! For many years now, for example, physicists have studied electronic properties of the two-dimensional systems that occur in layered semiconductors, and not without reward, since the operation of every computer chip today relies on properties of the electronic flatland at the interface between silicon and its oxide. © 2007 American Institute of Physics.