2-D materials enhance a 3-D world
In the past decade, two-dimensional, 2-D, materials have captured the fascination of a steadily increasing number of scientists. These materials, whose defining feature is having a thickness of only one to very few atoms, can be made of a variety of different elements or combinations thereof. Scientists' enchantment with 2-D materials began with Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov's Nobel Prize winning experiment: creating a 2-D material using a lump of graphite and common adhesive tape. This ingeniously simple experiment yielded an incredible material: graphene. This ultra-light material is roughly 200 times stronger than steel and is a superb conductor. Once scientists discovered that graphene had more impressive properties than its bulk component graphite, they decided to investigate other 2-D materials to see if this was a universal property.