Geim, Sir Andre Konstantinovich
Sir Andre Konstantinovich Geim, 1958–, Russian-born Dutch physicist, Ph.D. Russian Academy of Sciences, 1987. He was a professor at the Univ. of Nijmegen in the Netherlands from 1994 to 2001, when he joined the faculty at the Univ. of Manchester, England. Geim shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics with Konstantin Novoselov for groundbreaking experiments regarding graphene, an carbon material with a honeycomblike structure that is one atom thick. It was long known that graphite, which is found in the lead in ordinary pencils, had a tiered structure, but attempts to break it down into its constituent sheets had resulted in thin sheets of graphite but not graphene. In 2004 Novoselov and Geim successfully made graphene by sticking a flake of graphite debris onto adhesive tape, folding the tape over the flake and pulling it apart, cutting the flake in two. They repeated the process until they had a sheet just one atom thick.