The Graphene Flagship—A Giant European Research Project.

Synthetic carbon allotropes are currently at the forefront of materials science and nanotechnology. Following the zero-dimensional fullerenes and the one-dimensional carbon nanotubes, two-dimensional graphene is the youngest representative of this compound family. Its unprecedented physical properties mean that a lot of expectations towards practical applications have been raised within the scientific community, the general public, and even more so by politicians. The term graphene, which describes a conjugated 2D polymer that corresponds precisely one single layer of graphite, was pushed forward by HansPeter Boehm, who already pioneered wet-chemical graphene oxide (GO) chemistry in the 1960s. His studies included the TEM characterization of individual sheets of GO and reduced GO. Although these investigations were truly remarkable, one has to keep in mind that GO is an oxo-functionalized graphene, which has a poorly defined polydisperse structure including holes in the basal plane. Research on intact graphene with far superior properties remained unreported until 2004, when Geim and Novoselov described the preparation and detailed physical characterization of individual graphene sheets. They used a simple Scotch tape for the mechanical exfoliation of graphite. This scientific milestone was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 and ignited systematic studies worldwide. The number of publications in the field of graphene (from a Scifinder search) has risen from just over 1000 in 2010 to over 5000 in 2014.