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Graphene is a very exciting new material which is made of carbon. It is a sheet
of carbon that is only one atom thick. And so you can
think of it as a membrane of carbon.
And, all the carbon atoms are bonded together in a hexagonal
arrangement. And so it
looks like this. If you can see the hexagons where every
point here represents a single carbon atom
in a sheet of graphene.
Now, the reason that the carbon atoms in graphene can form this hexagonal array
is because each carbon atom has four chemical bonds. You can see them here
in this picture; one, two, three,
four. Three of them are in the plane. They're flat.
We call those the sigma bonds. Because of that strong chemical bond, graphene is
the strongest material that we know of.
uh... This fourth orbital is very important as well.
The electrons live here in this pylon, and they jump from one carbon atom to the other
in this perpendicular bond. And, that makes graphene the most electrically
conducting material that we know of.