Graphene
The theory of graphene was first explored by Wallace in 1947 as a starting point for understanding the electronic properties of 3D graphite. The emergent massless Dirac equation was first pointed out by Semenoff, DiVincenzo and Mele. The earliest TEM images of few-layer graphite were published by Ruess and Vogt in 1948. An early, detailed study on few-layer graphite dates to 1962 when Boehm and colleagues reported producing monolayer flakes of reduced graphene oxide. Efforts to make thin films of graphite by mechanical exfoliation started in 1990, but nothing thinner than 50 to 100 layers was produced before 2004. Initial attempts to make atomically thin graphitic films employed exfoliation techniques similar to the drawing method. Multilayer samples down to 10 nm in thickness were obtained.
Deji Akinwande
Akinwande collaborated with Aixtron on wafer-scale growth of graphene, characterization and integration The collaboration demonstrated scalable growth of polycrystalline graphene using chemical vapour deposition, creating the first 300 mm wafers. In 2011 he published the first textbook on Carbon Nanotube and Graphene Device Physics with Prof. Philip Wong of Stanford University. He was made a senior member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2013. He has made several advances in two dimensional graphene electronics. In 2015 he demonstrated the first two dimensional silicene transistor. Akinwande in collaboration with Alessandro Molle's group at CNR, Italy, achieved this by evaporating silicon onto a crystal of silver, monitoring the growth in real-time using scanning tunnelling microscopy. This research breakthrough was selected as one of the top science stories of 2015 by Discover magazine. The silicene work is the most cited Nature Nanotechnology publication of similar age.