Now let us hear the viewpoints on graphene
from Professor Per Delsing from Chalmers,
who is currently the chairman of the Nobel Physics Committee.
It's not the fastest Nobel Prize in history.
There's been several who have been faster.
And in fact, some have been given already the year
after the discovery.
For instance, in the '80s, there are several prizes where
it was much quicker than that.
Even though if you look at more recent prizes, some of them
have been discovered quite old, or 20 or even 30 years back.
So in that perspective, it was a quick prize, yes.
So they used a very inventive technique
to exfoliate graphene, and they used essentially ordinary
scotch tape to peel off very thin flakes of graphene.
And then they found a method to evaluate
under the microscope how thin layers they could get,
and they actually managed to get single layers,
single atomic layers.
And that was really the-- the key paper was in 2004,
and that's when they showed that they could actually exfoliate
the graphene, and they could also
measure the expected electrical properties
of the graphene layer.
Well, if we start with fundamental research,
I think that graphene is representative
of a large class of materials-- not only carbon,
but also a number of other materials
which can be monotonically thin.
And there's a number of those that have different properties.
And what I think is very interesting
is that you can stack those layers on top of each other,
and you can build heterostructures
of all these materials.
I think we will very soon see applications of graphene.
I know there are cellphone prototypes
with graphene in the screen.
The nice thing is that graphene is a transparent conductor,
so it can be used to conduct electricity nicely,
and still you can see through it, which
is a very unusual property.
But there's, of course, a number of different applications,
all the way from medicine to electronics and also
to composite materials where you can build graphene
into materials and it becomes-- in essence, it's
a very strong material, you can make very strong materials out
of it.