The 2010 Nobel prize for physics has been awarded for research on graphene, a single atomic layer of carbon that holds potential for use in electronics, but skirmishes over the history of the field have only just begun. Eleven days after Nature revealed errors in the Nobel Prize committee’s background document explaining the award of the prize to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester, UK, the committee issued a revised version.
No erratum was released, but a comparison of the new document with the old shows that several sentences discussing the history of the field have been modified. For example, the new version omits a disputed statement that graphene was not thought to be stable prior to its isolation by Geim and Novoselov in a highly-cited 2004 paper in Science. It also tones down the claim that the 2004 work came as a “complete surprise” to the physics community; now, it was merely a “surprise.” The committee has additionally corrected errors in two disputed figure captions that appeared to exaggerate contributions by Geim and Novoselov at the expense of work by other researchers.
Hanns-Peter Boehm, a chemist at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, whose 1962 work on graphene is cited by the Nobel prize committee, says the changes are an improvement. “The committee acknowledges that some researchers had thought that it should be possible, in principle, to prepare graphene monolayers,” he says. But he questions a statement that remains unchanged saying that following work done in the 1960s “there were doubts” that “single layers could be isolated in such a way that electrical measurements could be performed on them”. “There is no citation for such doubts and I cannot remember having read of them,” says Boehm.
As the Nobel committee struggles to chart an authoritative history of the field, competing versions of events are on offer from the experts. In Geim’s Nobel Prize lecture, posted online today, Geim traces his decision to work on graphene to three influences; papers he had read on metallic electronics, an explosion of interest on carbon nanotubes including work by Japanese physicist Sumio Iijima, and a review article on graphite by Mildred Dresselhaus of MIT. He suggests that his and Novoselov’s 2004 paper marked the first time that a single atomic layer of carbon had been isolated in a totally unambiguous way, and he repeats the suggestion that there was some reason before that to think graphene might not be stable. “This is probably why it took so long for graphene to be isolated,” he says.
Meanwhile Walt de Heer of the Georgia Institute of Technology, who wrote a letter to the Nobel prize committee in November to object to several statements in its document, today released his account of the history of the field in a paper to mark the award of the Materials Research Society Medal for his own work on graphene. In the paper, he describes a long history of attempts to isolate graphene, and says that the method of isolation that Geim and Novoselov published in 2004 was similar to a method that his own group proposed in 2001, and that Rod Ruoff of the University of Texas at Austin pioneered in 1999.
Boehm points out that the Nobel prize committee appears to have confused this method with a different and easier method of isolating graphene – by peeling layers of graphite off with Scotch tape. Boehm says the Scotch tape method was also known of in the 1960s. It was used by Geim and Novoselov in a 2005 paper to isolate graphene and perform electronic measurements.
Boehm says in his view, the Nobel committee “has not exercised the care expected for such a decision”. But he nevertheless believes that the award can be justified by Geim and Novoselov’s electronic measurements on graphene. “These were certainly new with, in large part, unexpected results,” he says. “We had, in 1962, no application in mind.”
Image: Andre Geim / Prolineserver 2010, Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons