A feed of tagged nodes. https://hexnet.org/blog <p> <img src='/files/images/hexnet/inanimate-carbon-rod.png' title='In Rod We Trust' alt='Inanimate carbon rod' class='image-right'/> This just in, from SWEDEN: </p> <p> Hexagons have won this year's <a class="ex" href="http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/">Nobel Prize in Physics</a>. More specifically, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov won the prize for their <a class="ex" href="http://onnes.ph.man.ac.uk/nano/Publications/Science_2004.pdf">work with hexagons</a>. </p> <p> In summary, for those who do not follow such things (and I have noticed that "graphene" is among the top keywords bringing people to this site, so it is quite possible you <i>do</i> follow such things): <a class="ex" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene">Graphene</a> was "discovered," or if you will isolated, by Geim and Novoselov in 2004, by peeling off layers of graphite with scotch tape. It is essentially an indefinitely large aromatic molecule, and the flat, two-dimensional form of the <a class="ex" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene">buckyball</a> or the <a class="ex" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckytube">buckytube</a>. For a variety of reasons I won't get into here, it has numerous potential applications in electronics and nanotechnology, and is quite interesting all around. </p> <p> It had never actually occurred to me prior to 2004 that graphene needed to be "discovered." I had always been taught that graphite, as a major allotrope of carbon, consisted of one-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice, and that this had been known for quite a while (since at least the advent of X-ray crystallography). Thus it really shouldn't have been too much of a conceptual leap to assume that, in fact, such sheets existed (though apparently the prevailing view was that the sheets would "roll up" when isolated). I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that it took until 2004 to actually discover this. Particularly with all the research that's gone on with fullerenes since the '80s, you'd think somebody, somewhere, would've taken the time to actually isolate a sheet of graphite. Apparently it is somewhat difficult, but crap I have scotch tape and pencils lying around, by all rights that Nobel could've been mine. </p> Tue, 05 Oct 2010 18:24:37 +0000 https://hexnet.org/content/graphene-ftvw https://hexnet.org/content/graphene-ftvw <p> Recent advances in microscopy have allowed the direct imaging of molecular bonds for the first time. Here we see several images highlighting the hexagonal structure of several hydrocarbons. </p> Sat, 03 Jul 2010 06:16:02 +0000 https://hexnet.org/content/hexagonal-molecules-atomic-force-microscopy https://hexnet.org/content/hexagonal-molecules-atomic-force-microscopy