Graphene pioneer Sir Andre Geim has predicted that those working with the material may win “another Nobel prize or two” given the vast amount of research happening in the field.
Speaking at Times Higher Education’s World Academic Summit at the University of Manchester on 8 October, Sir Andre rejected any notion that the ultra-thin and ultra-strong material – whose discovery saw him win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 alongside his former PhD student Konstantin Novoselov – had failed to live up to its promise, suggesting that such criticisms are short-sighted and the product of “hype and BS”.
“It is not like writing a computer code which, in a few years, makes you a billionaire,” said Sir Andre, in a conversation with Manchester’s former vice-chancellor, Dame Nancy Rothwell.
“With materials science, it takes a lot of time – you need to investigate the material and its limits. Companies need to apply it, find out whether it is useful or completely useless, and make up their minds,” he explained.
For example, several hundred tonnes of the material – known for its durability, lightness, conductivity and many other properties – were now being manufactured across the world, and graphene was now being added to tarmac mix to improve its lifespan, Sir Andre said.
“I thought it was too expensive – I thought this was hype, but eventually people were persuaded to put this additive into a track of road near Oxfordshire. How many years does tarmac last? About six years. But they found that although [graphene] increased the price of tarmac by 25 per cent, the durability increased by 250 per cent,” he said.
“A month ago, I was in Italy and a big-time supplier said they would, from 2025, cover the motorway between Turin and Milan with it,” he explained.
On criticisms that graphene had yet to find its “killer app”, he said: “That’s how it is happening – it’s happening slowly, though I am surprised it is happening so fast.”
Nonetheless, the material was increasingly prevalent in everyday items, even if its use was not always obvious. “If you have an electric car, graphene is there. If you are talking about flexible, transparent and wearable electronics, graphene-like materials have a good chance of being there. Graphene is also in lithium ion batteries as it improves these batteries by 1 or 2 per cent,” he said on its hidden applications.
“Ten years ago, people sold tiny pieces of graphene – no wider than a hair – but now people can make square kilometres of it,” he concluded.
Furthermore, many universities around the world have established teams working on the material in disciplines from chemical engineering and biology to electronics and brain science, he said.
“Thousands of people are trying to understand how it works. I would not be surprised if graphene gets another Nobel prize or two given there are so many people who believe in this area of research.
“Some areas of research which are 50 or 60 years old only have a few people working on them. Many, many people are working on graphene and graphene-related materials,” Sir Andre said.
But, he said, he had always been sceptical that graphene would replace silicon in semiconductors – one potential application that has failed to emerge despite its apparent advantage over silicon and the huge demand for more powerful semiconductors that can power artificial intelligence. However, he did not rule out its use in this industry.
“Several semiconductors are considered the next model basis for the industry, although I am a little bit doubtful about this claim,” Sir Andre said.
Asked how he might approach graphene differently after its announcement in 2004, Sir Andre said he regretted spending time and money on graphene patents in the hope that one of these might prove lucrative.
“We were under a lot of pressure, especially from ministers, to do a lot of patenting,” he recalled.
“Newspapers loved to say ‘Manchester has not as many patents as China’. But we wasted maybe a million pounds on useless patents, which I was against. We made it a priority to patent things that no one wanted.”
