Sir Andrei Konstantinovich Game is a full member of the Royal Society, an employee of the University of Manchester and a British-Dutch physicist born in Russia. Together with Konstantin Novoselov in 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on graphene. Currently, he is a Regius professor and director of the Center for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology at the University of Manchester.
Andrey Game: biography
Born 10.21.58 in the family of Konstantin Alekseevich Game and Nina Nikolaevna Bayer. His parents were Soviet engineers of German descent. According to Game, his mother’s grandmother was Jewish, and he suffered from anti-Semitism because his surname sounds Jewish. Game has a brother Vladislav. In 1965, his family moved to Nalchik, where he studied at a school specializing in English. After graduating with honors, he twice tried to enter the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, but was not accepted. Then he submitted documents to MIPT, and this time he managed to do so. According to him, the students studied very hard - the pressure was so strong that often people broke down and left school, and some ended with depression, schizophrenia and suicide.
Academic career
Andrei Game received his diploma in 1982, and in 1987 became a candidate of science in metal physics at the Institute of Solid State Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Chernogolovka. According to the scientist, at that time he did not want to engage in this direction, preferring elementary particle physics or astrophysics, but today he is pleased with his choice.
Game worked as a research fellow at the Institute of Microelectronics Technology at the Russian Academy of Sciences, and since 1990, at the universities of Nottingham (twice), Bath and Copenhagen. According to him, abroad he could be engaged in research, and not deal with politics, and therefore decided to leave the USSR.
Work in the Netherlands
Andrei Game took his first full-time position in 1994, when he became an assistant professor at the University of Nijmegen, where he studied mesoscopic superconductivity. He later received Dutch citizenship. One of his graduate students was Konstantin Novoselov, who became his main scientific partner. However, according to Game, his academic career in the Netherlands was far from cloudless. He was offered a professorship in Nijmegen and Eindhoven, but he refused, because he found the Dutch academic system too hierarchical and filled with petty politicking, it is completely unlike the British, where each employee is equal. In his Nobel lecture, Game later said that such a situation was a little surreal, because outside the walls of the university he was warmly welcomed everywhere, including his supervisor and other scientists.
Relocation to the UK
In 2001, Game became a professor of physics at the University of Manchester, and in 2002 he was appointed director of the Manchester Center for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology and Professor Langworthy. His wife and long-time co-author Irina Grigoryeva also moved to Manchester as a teacher. Later, Konstantin Novoselov joined them. Since 2007, Game has become a senior fellow at the Engineering and Physical Research Council. In 2010, the University of Nijmegen appointed him professor of innovative materials and nanoscience.
Research
Game managed to find a simple way to isolate a single layer of graphite atoms, known as graphene, in collaboration with scientists from the University of Manchester and IMT. In October 2004, the group published the results of their work in the journal Science.
Graphene consists of a carbon layer whose atoms are arranged in the form of two-dimensional hexagons. It is the thinnest material in the world, and also one of the most durable and solid. The substance has many potential uses and is an excellent alternative to silicon. According to Game, one of the first applications of graphene could be the development of flexible touch screens. He did not patent the new material, because for this he would need a specific field of application and a partner in the industry.
A physicist was developing a biomimetic adhesive that became known as gecko tape due to the stickiness of the gecko's limbs. These studies are still in their early stages, but they already give hope that in the future people will be able to climb the ceilings, like Spider-Man.
In 1997, Game studied the possibility of the effects of magnetism on water, which led to the famous discovery of direct diamagnetic levitation of water, which was widely known for demonstrating a levitating frog. He also worked on superconductivity and studied mesoscopic physics.
Regarding the choice of subjects of his research, Game said that he despises the approach when many choose the subject for their dissertation and then continue the same topic until retirement. Before he got his first full-time job, he changed his subject five times, and this helped him learn a lot.
In a 2001 paper, he co-authored his favorite hamster Tishu.
History of the discovery of graphene
One of the fall evenings of 2002, Andrei Geim thought about carbon. He specialized in microscopically thin materials and wondered how the thinnest layers of a substance can behave under certain experimental conditions. Graphite, consisting of monatomic films, was an obvious candidate for research, but standard methods for isolating ultrathin samples would overheat and destroy it. Therefore, Game instructed one of the new graduate students, Da Jiang, to try to obtain a sample as thin as possible, at least in several hundred layers of atoms, by polishing a graphite crystal one inch in size. A few weeks later, Jiang brought a grain of carbon in a petri dish. After examining it under a microscope, Game asked him to try again. Jiang said that this is all that remains of the crystal. At the time when Game jokingly reproached him with the fact that the graduate student wiped the mountain to get a grain of sand, one of his senior comrades saw clumps of used adhesive tape in the trash basket, the sticky side of which was covered with a gray, slightly shiny film of graphite residues.
In laboratories around the world, researchers use tape to test the adhesion properties of experimental samples. The carbon layers that make up graphite are loosely bound (since 1564, the material has been used in pencils, since it leaves a visible mark on paper), so that the adhesive tape easily separates the flakes. Game placed a piece of duct tape under the microscope and found that the thickness of the graphite was less than the one he had seen so far. Folding, squeezing and separating the adhesive tape, he managed to achieve even thinner layers.
Game succeeded for the first time in isolating a two-dimensional material: a monatomic layer of carbon, which under the atomic microscope looks like a flat lattice of hexagons resembling a honeycomb. Theoretical physicists called such a substance graphene, but they did not assume that it could be obtained at room temperature. It seemed to them that the material would break up into microscopic balls. Instead, Game saw that graphene remains in one plane, which becomes rippled as the substance stabilizes.
Graphene: Great Properties
Andrei Game resorted to the help of graduate student Konstantin Novoselov, and they began to study the new substance for fourteen hours a day. Over the next two years, they conducted a series of experiments in which the astounding properties of the material were discovered. Due to its unique structure, electrons, without experiencing the influence of other layers, can move along the lattice unhindered and unusually fast. The conductivity of graphene is thousands of times greater than copper. The first revelation for the Game was the observation of a pronounced "field effect", manifested in the presence of an electric field, which allows you to control the conductivity. This effect is one of the defining characteristics of silicon used in computer chips. This suggests that graphene could be its replacement, which computer manufacturers have been looking for for many years.
Path to recognition
Game and Konstantin Novoselov wrote a three-page work describing their discoveries. It was rejected twice by Nature, one reviewer of which stated that isolation of stable two-dimensional material is impossible, while the other did not see in it “sufficient scientific progress”. But in October 2004, an article entitled “The effect of an electric field in carbon films of atomic thickness” was published in the journal Science, making a great impression on scientists - science fiction was becoming reality in their eyes.
Discovery avalanche
Laboratories around the world have begun research using Game’s adhesive tape technique, and scientists have discovered other properties of graphene. Although it was the thinnest material in the universe, it was 150 times stronger than steel. Graphene turned out to be malleable, like rubber, and could stretch to 120% of its length. Thanks to the research of Philip Kim, and then scientists at Columbia University, it was found that this material is even more electrically conductive than previously established. Kim placed graphene in a vacuum, where no other material could slow the movement of its subatomic particles, and showed that it has "mobility" - the speed at which an electric charge passes through a semiconductor - 250 times greater than that of silicon.
Technology race
In 2010, six years after the opening, which was made by Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, the Nobel Prize was still awarded to them. Then the media called graphene "miracle material", a substance that, "can change the world." He was contacted by academic researchers in the fields of physics, electrical engineering, medicine, chemistry, etc. Patents were issued for the use of graphene in batteries, flexible screens, desalination systems, advanced solar panels, ultrafast microcomputers.
Scientists in China have created the lightest material in the world - graphene-airgel. It is 7 times lighter than air - one cubic meter of substance weighs just 160 g. Graphene-airgel is created by freeze-drying a gel containing graphene and nanotubes.
The British government invested $ 60 million in the University of Manchester, where Game and Novoselov work, to create on its basis the National Graphene Institute, which would allow the country to be on a par with the world's best patent holders - Korea, China and the United States, which began the race to create the first in the world of revolutionary products based on new material.
Honors and Awards
The experiment with magnetic levitation of a living frog brought not quite the result that Michael Berry and Andrei Game were expecting. The Shnobel Prize was awarded to them in 2000.
In 2006, Game received the award from Scientific American 50.
In 2007, the Institute of Physics awarded him the Mott Prize and Medal. Then Game was elected a member of the Royal Society.
Game and Novoselov shared the 2008 Europhysics Prize "for the detection and isolation of a monatomic carbon layer and the determination of its remarkable electronic properties." In 2009, he received the Kerber Award.
The next prize of Andrei Geim, named after John Carty, with whom he was awarded the US National Academy of Sciences in 2010, was given "for his experimental implementation and research of graphene, a two-dimensional form of carbon."
Also in 2010, he received one of the six honorary professorships of the Royal Society and the Hughes medal "for the revolutionary discovery of graphene and the identification of its remarkable properties." The game was awarded honorary doctorates by the Delft University of Technology, the Higher Technical School of Zurich, the Universities of Antwerp and Manchester.
In 2010, he became a holder of the Dutch Lion Order for his contribution to Dutch science. In 2012, for his services to science, Game was promoted to knight-bachelor. He was elected a foreign corresponding member of the United States Academy of Sciences in May 2012.
Nobel laureate
Game and Novoselov were awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering studies of graphene. Upon hearing the award, Game announced that he did not expect to receive it this year and was not about to change his immediate plans. The modern physicist expressed the hope that graphene and other two-dimensional crystals will change the daily life of mankind in the same way as plastic did. The award made him the first person to become a Nobel and Shnobel Prize winner at the same time. The lecture was held on December 8, 2010 at Stockholm University.