A Letter to the Nobel Committee

The letter to the Nobel Committee below was written in response to the Scientific Background document issued by the Nobel Committee in support of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded jointly to Geim and Novoselov for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene (an updated version of the Scientific Background document can be found at Ref. [1]). The letter has been reproduced in full from Ref. [2] for scientific clarity. 

Class for Physics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 

Brownson and C. E. Banks, The Handbook of Graphene Electrochemistry, DOI 10.1007/978-1 71-6428-9, Springer-Verlag London Ltd. 2014 

Geim and Novoselov developed a very simple method to produce and observe microscopic graphene slivers on oxidized, degenerately doped silicon wafers. This method was copied by many and provides an ideal method to produce graphene samples for two-dimensional transport studies. The development of this experimental technique was very important for the held of mesoscopic physics, and as pointed out in the document, this was Geim and Novoselov s most important contribution. 

Further note that de facto isolated graphene had been identified and characterized as a 2D-crystalline material in many reports prior to 2004 (see for example [4] for a review). The characterization of graphene as a new 2D material is incorrect. This might be corrected in the document along the lines of the second paragraph in this item. 

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