2008/03/26 by Rahul R. Nair, R. R. Nair, Peter Blake +11 · 10 citations
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Memory and Neural Computing #CCD and CMOS Imaging Sensors #Graphene research and applications #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1126/science.1156965
published as Science 320, 1308 (2008).
arxiv created 2008/03/26 · openalex publication_date 2008/04/04 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
There are few phenomena in condensed matter physics that are defined only by the fundamental constants and do not depend on material parameters. Examples are the resistivity quantum, h/e2 (h is Planck's constant and e the electron charge), that appears in a variety of transport experiments and the magnetic flux quantum, h/e, playing an important role in the physics of superconductivity. By and large, sophisticated facilities and special measurement conditions are required to observe any of these phenomena. We show that the opacity of suspended graphene is defined solely by the fine structure constant, a = e2/hc feminine 1/137 (where c is the speed of light), the parameter that describes coupling between light and relativistic electrons and that is traditionally associated with quantum electrodynamics rather than materials science. Despite being only one atom thick, graphene is found to absorb a significant (pa = 2.3%) fraction of incident white light, a consequence of graphene's unique electronic structure.