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Carbon
is unique among elements due to the
wide variety of structures that it can support. This property has long provided a playground for chemists
and
biologists, but it is only relatively recently that physicists
have discovered
what a flexible material carbon is for creating nanostructures
with quantum
mechanical behavior unlike any other substance. It is ironic that the most recent big breakthrough in the
study of
carbon-based materials has come from isolating the particulate
matter of pencil
scratchings, now called graphene. The
irony is that from such mundane origins comes such a
surprisingly interesting
material. In this talk I will provide a
termite's view of graphene, and describe some of the phenomena
that you would
see if you could shrink yourself down to the size of an atom and
jump into a
graphene flatland. The tool that gives
us this view is the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). I will describe how the STM gives us new
insight into the unusual ways that electrons move in pieces of
graphene that have
been structured at the nanometer scale. |