Playing with the wonder materials

Ashish Arora in the lab experimenting with laser light. WWU - Peter Leßmann The diameter of a hair, but a hundred thousand times thinner - the products made by Dr. Ashish Arora and his colleagues in the laboratories of the Institute of Physics are difficult to imagine for outsiders. The materials they deal with on a daily basis hold a world record because they consist of a single layer of atoms, the smallest building blocks of nature. "Wonder materials," Ashish Arora calls them because they are so versatile. And because they have properties that are hard to believe: Graphene, for example, is an almost transparent substance and a hundred times stronger than steel. This one atom thick layer could, for example, carry the weight of a cat. Two Russian-British scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010 for their discovery of this layer of carbon atoms, which has been removed from graphite.