Graphene is a one-atom-thick planar sheet of sp2-bondedcarbon atoms densely packed in a hexagonal honeycomb crystal lattice. Although graphene had been studied theoretically for decades, its actual existence wasn’t proven until 2004, when Kostya Novoselov and Andrei Geim from the Manchester University managed to isolate a monolayer for the first time. In 2010 they were awarded the Nobel Prize.
In our group we are interested in exploring and exploiting some of the exceptional properties of graphene – at the moment we focus on mechanical and electrochemical alteration of its electronic structure and we try to observe the response to these changes by various methods, but mainly with Raman spectroscopy. We prepare our samples either ourselves by CVD or mechanical exfoliation.