Graphene reveals its magnetic personality

Can organic matter behave like a fridge magnet? Scientists from The University of Manchester have now shown that it can. In a report published , they used graphene, the world's thinnest and strongest material, and made it magnetic. Graphene is a sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a chicken wire structure. In its pristine state, it exhibits no signs of the conventional magnetism usually associated with such materials as iron or nickel. Demonstrating its remarkable properties won Manchester researchers the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. This latest research led by Irina Grigorieva and Professor Sir Andre Geim (one of the Nobel prize recipients) could prove crucial to the future of graphene in electronics. The Manchester researchers took nonmagnetic graphene and then either 'peppered' it with other nonmagnetic atoms like fluorine or removed some carbon atoms from the chicken wire.