Konstantin Novoselov

Konstantin Sergeyevich Novoselov (born 23 August 1974) is a Russian-British physicist. In 2010 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Andre Geim for the work on graphene.

At 36 he was one of the youngest Nobel laureates in physics of the post-war period.

Career

Novoselov was born in Nizhny Tagil in the Urals, an industrial city with steelworks and tank manufacturing. Like Geim he studied at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and came to him in Nijmegen as a doctoral student in 1999. In 2001 both moved to the University of Manchester, where Novoselov took his doctorate in 2004 and today holds a professorship.

The collaboration between the two is unusually close and has been going on for more than twenty years. Geim has repeatedly described Novoselov as the one who mustered the patience for the laborious parts of the work.

The proof that graphene exists

The sticky-tape method is the familiar image, but it was only the first step. The actual scientific achievement consisted in showing that one really did have a single atomic layer in front of one — and in measuring its properties.

That was by no means self-evident. Theoretical work by Landau and Peierls had for decades suggested that a strictly two-dimensional crystal could not be stable at all at room temperature; thermal motion would have to destroy it. Many considered the search for it hopeless.

The decisive trick

Novoselov's contribution lay in the preparation and the measurement.

A single carbon layer is practically transparent — it cannot be seen under the microscope. The trick was a silicon oxide layer exactly 300 nanometres thick as a substrate. At this thickness the interference of light produces a faint but recognisable difference in colour as soon as a single atomic layer lies on top of it.

This made it possible to find, in an ordinary light microscope, what would otherwise have been detectable only with great effort. Without this device the sticky-tape method would have remained useless, because one would not have been able to find the result again.

The paper in Science of October 2004 then demonstrated the field effect: the conductivity of the layer could be controlled by an applied voltage. Graphene behaved like a semiconductor component.

Why the layer is stable after all

The answer to the theoretical objection is as simple as it is beautiful: graphene is not really flat. It ripples slightly in the third dimension, and these ripples stabilise the layer.

It is precisely this rippling motion that the working group around Paul Thibado later took as its starting point when it investigated whether current can be obtained from the thermal vibrations of freestanding graphene — the ratchet effect.

What was a by-product of stability for Novoselov thereby became a possible source of energy.

Further work

For years Novoselov has been researching stacks of two-dimensional materials — so-called van der Waals heterostructures. Different atomic layers are laid on top of one another like sheets, and properties result that none of the layers has on its own. Even a slight twist of two graphene layers against each other changes the behaviour fundamentally.

This idea — function through arrangement rather than through choice of material — is also found in neutrinovoltaic technology and in the idea of the metamaterial.

Since 2012 he has been a Knight of the British Empire; today he additionally conducts research in Singapore.

Andre Geim — his co-laureate
Graphene — the material
Ratchet effect — energy from the rippling motion
Metamaterial — function through arrangement

Sources

K. S. Novoselov, A. K. Geim et al.: Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films, Science 306, 666 (2004).
A. K. Geim, K. S. Novoselov: The rise of graphene, Nature Materials 6, 183 (2007).