”Our work showed how pretty damn good that material is“

Nachrichten aus der Chemie: Congratulations on your Nobel Prize, Mr. Geim!

Andre Geim: Thank you.

Nachrichten: Has winning the Nobel Prize changed your life plan?

Geim: Some people tend to stop doing research once they got a Nobel Prize. But I'm not that kind of guy. I'll go on working just like before. My work is my hobby.

Nachrichten: The world is toasting your success as the recoverer of graphene. How does that feel?

Geim: Well, recovery is a very large word. I'd say we were the first to discover how wonderful graphene is — that it was in fact worth discovering. A little research had been done in this area before, and a couple of people saw indications that graphene is possible, but it just went unnoticed. So our work just showed how pretty damn good that material is.

Nachrichten: But you were the first to synthesize graphene?

Geim: Correct. We made graphene in its isolated form. We discovered that it is possible to pull out a single atomic plane out of graphite. We are dealing with a new state of matter that is strictly two dimensional or one atom thick.

Nachrichten: What role does your co-laureate Konstantin Novoselov

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