Fazny Zavahir: Graphene Wins Nobel Prize

The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to the two researchers who performed the first experiments on graphene, a two-dimensional sheet of carbon atoms. The award, given to University of Manchester physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, recognizes work that began less than a decade ago on a material that’s since been used to make record-breaking transistors and stretchy electrodes.

 Graphene is a material of many superlatives: it’s the best conductor of electricity at room temperature and the strongest material ever tested. It’s also an excellent heat conductor, and is transparent and flexible. Before Geim and Novoselov’s work, researchers had theorized the material’s existence, and had predicted that it could be used to make transistors more than 100 times faster than those in today’s silicon-based chips. But until the U.K. researchers made and tested graphene in 2004, many physicists guessed that materials one-atom thick would be unstable.

In 2004, Geim and Novoselov made graphene in the lab by using adhesive tape to peel a chunk of graphite into ever-thinner sheets, as in this video. A graphene sheet is a single layer of carbon atoms enmeshed in a honeycomb-like, repeating hexagon pattern.

Graphene is a naturally occurring material. Layers of graphene make up the graphite found in pencil lead. When you trace a pencil on a piece of paper, these layers are cleaved, leaving thin layers of these carbon sheets. By crushing graphite and peeling it with tape into ever-thinner flakes and eventually into pieces just one atom thick, Geim and Novoselov were able to make usuable quantities of graphene that could be studied and to lay to rest doubts about graphene’s stability.

In their initial work, in 2004, they not only demonstrated that they had made graphene, but also elucidated its electrical properties by patterning it and connecting it to electrodes. “They were not the first ones ever to see graphene, but certainly it was Geim and Novoselov who really opened the door to be able to study it,” says James Tour, professor of chemistry at Rice University.

Once they developed this experimental system for studying the material, Geim and Novoselov, and other researchers who followed, found some remarkable things. First, electrons in graphene behave as if they have no mass, careening forward at speeds of one million meters per second. (Compare that to the speed of light in a vacuum, 300 million meters per second.) And while electrons usually bounce off obstacles inside a conductive material, electrons traveling through the perfect honeycomb lattice of graphene have smooth sailing.

Graphene’s perfect structure gives rise to exotic quantum effects that are being studied by physicists. However, the material’s electrical properties, its transparency, and its strength have been seized on by engineers working to make everything from touch screens to solar cells to lightweight structural materials. Researchers at IBM are developing arrays of graphene transistors that leave conventional silicon in the dust, and a group at Samsung is developing printed graphene electrodes for use in transparent, flexible touch screens.

In recognition of the promise of the material, TR featured work at Georgia Tech on graphene transistors as one of the most promising emerging technologies in 2008; in the same year we recognized Novoselov with our young innovator award, the TR35.

Geim and Novoselov’s technique can be used to make graphene in relatively small quantities, enough to study it in the lab and make test devices, but nowhere near enough for manufacturing. In the intervening years, researchers have developed methods for making larger quantities of the material, and now they’re learning how to use it to make devices.

“Now we have to find ways of synthesizing graphene reliably on a large scale, and making these technologies reproducibly in a way that makes economic sense,” says Phaedon Avouris, a researcher developing graphene transistors and photodetectors at IBM’s Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

Fazny Zavahir: Post-Peace Prize

As the West applauds Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel, China sees another attempt to impose Western values on it.

Norway’s Nobel Peace Prize committee has done the right thing in awarding this year’s prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. The furious reaction of the Chinese state shows just how complicated doing the right thing will become as we advance into an increasingly post-Western world.

Liu is exactly the kind of person who deserves this prize, alongside Andrei Sakharov, Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. For more than 20 years, he has consistently advocated nonviolent change in China, always in the direction of more respect for human rights, the rule of law and democracy. He has paid for this peaceful advocacy with years of imprisonment and harassment. Unlike last year’s winner, Barack Obama, who got the prize just for what he had promised to do, Liu gets it for what he has actually done.

The Chinese authorities tried hard to prevent him getting it. They directly threatened the Nobel committee with negative consequences for Chinese-Norwegian relations. They have since described the award as an “obscenity,” forbidden any mention of it in the censored Chinese media, placed Liu’s wife under house arrest, detained other critical intellectuals, canceled export talks with Norway — and are now doubtless debating how to play it from here.

Meanwhile, in the capitals of the West, many are quietly questioning whether this really was such a good decision. These questions are important, but one hypocritical or self-deceiving argument must be demolished at once. This is the claim that it will not be good even for dissidents if a leading dissident receives the Nobel Prize. One used to hear a similar case made by Western politicians who declined to meet with Sakharov, Lech Walesa or Vaclav Havel. Commenting on an American elder statesman’s visit to Moscow, one Russian writer told me, “He says it would not be good for Sakharov if they met, but what he really means is that it would not be good for him if he met Sakharov.”

It is for the dissidents to decide what is good for the dissidents. All the evidence we have so far suggests that Chinese dissidents are thrilled with the award, even though it means, predictably enough, that they face another crackdown. It’s not as if the Chinese Communist Party was treating them gently before. Liu was sent to jail for 11 years last year despite all the “quiet diplomacy” of Western and other politicians. By his wife’s account, he was deeply moved when he heard the news of his award in prison, and dedicated it to the “lost souls” of Tiananmen Square.

At the moment, Liu and his colleagues constitute a tiny minority of Chinese citizens. Most of their compatriots have accepted the deal proposed to them by the Communist Party since the late 1970s, and more particularly since 1989: extraordinary economic freedom, and considerable social, cultural and even intellectual freedom, so long as they do not challenge the central political pillars of the party-state. In this sense, Liu is not comparable with Mandela or Suu Kyi, leaders of oppressed mass movements.

One must acknowledge, as the Nobel committee does in its citation, that China’s unprecedented hybrid version of authoritarian capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and is delivering for many of its citizens in many ways. Unlike Myanmar or apartheid South Africa, the Chinese state enjoys a great deal of support from its people. The test will come, of course, when economic growth slows.

We simply cannot know how Liu’s compatriots will regard him in, say, 20 years. It seems almost unthinkable that things will turn upside down, as they did in Czechoslovakia, so that an isolated dissident like Havel suddenly becomes the elected president. It is slightly more imaginable that Liu becomes a litmus test for the boldness of a reformist leader. As Mikhail Gorbachev’s telephone call to Nobel Prize winner Sakharov, lifting his sentence of banishment, marked a turning point in the history of the Soviet Union, could a phone call to Nobel Prize winner Liu from, say, the next or next-but-one Chinese leader mark another stage in China’s political modernization? Tuesday’s publication of an open letter from former senior Communist Party officials demanding more freedom of expression is an indication that the hopes of reformists inside the party and dissidents outside it are not necessarily miles apart.

It is, however, entirely possible that Liu and his colleagues will remain a small minority, representing an authentic but never predominant tradition in modern Chinese history: the liberal, constitutionalist modernization that they evoke in the Charter 08 manifesto that earned Liu both prison and prize.

The fearful, offended reaction of the Chinese party-state testifies to its own insecurity and its still fundamentally Leninist inability to tolerate any genuinely autonomous sources of social and political authority. It also speaks of a deep, and more widely shared, sense of national humiliation at the hands of the West. How they would love to have the international recognition of a Nobel Prize. But who are the three Chinese, or China-related, Nobel Prize winners? Gao Xingjian, a Chinese novelist who emigrated to France and holds French citizenship, the Dalai Lama, and now Liu. Slap, slap, slap.

The Nobel citation talks of “universal” human rights. Charter 08 talks of “universal values.” But Chinese leaders hear only “Western” values and the West’s post-imperial but still imperialist quest to impose them on China.

Over the next decade, I see three approaches we in the West can take in response: capitulation, Huntingtonism or a real dialogue about universal values. Capitulation would mean bowing to Chinese blackmail — so that, for example, Western leaders would no longer receive the Dalai Lama. By Huntingtonism I mean the way Samuel Huntington envisaged us avoiding the “clash of civilizations.” This was, in essence, to say “all right, you do it your way over there and we’ll do it our way over here.” As China’s power grows, that is where we may end up. But it is definitely too soon to give up on the hope of reaching some deeper understanding of what are genuinely universal values, as opposed to only Western ones.

In this conversation, we cannot act as if the West has found all the answers, for everyone, forever —an assumption that looks more implausible by the minute. If, instead of closing up defensively like a hedgehog, China were prepared to engage confidently and even offensively in an argument about universal values, we should welcome that with open arms. The alternatives are more likely, but worse.

Timothy Garton Ash, a contributing editor to Opinion, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of European studies at Oxford University. He is the author of, most recently, “Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name.”

Fazny Zavahir | Dalai Lama congratulates fellow Nobel laureate

BEIJING: Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama offered his congratulations to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo for winning the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, calling on the government to release him and other jailed activists.

“Awarding the Peace Prize to him is the international community’s recognition of the increasing voices among the Chinese people in pushing China towards political, legal and constitutional reforms,” the Dalai Lama said in a statement on his website (www.dalailama.com).

“I have been personally moved as well as encouraged by the efforts of hundreds of Chinese intellectuals and concerned citizens, including Mr Liu Xiaobo in signing the Charter 08, which calls for democracy and freedom in China.”

Liu helped organise the “Charter 08″ petition which called for sweeping political reforms and was modelled on the Charter 77 petition which became the rallying call for the human rights movement in communist Czechoslovakia in 1977.

“I believe in the years ahead, future generations of Chinese will be able to enjoy the fruits of the efforts that the current Chinese citizens are making towards responsible governance,” the Dalai Lama added. “I would like to take this opportunity to renew my call to the government of China to release Mr Liu Xiaobo and other prisoners of conscience who have been imprisoned for exercising their freedom of expression,” he said.

Beijing was furious when the Dalai Lama won his Peace Prize in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protesters by Chinese authorities. China accuses the Dalai Lama of fanning a violent campaign for separatism. He denies China’s charges against him, and says he only seeks more meaningful autonomy for Tibet through purely peaceful means.

Chinese Communist troops marched into Tibet in 1950. The Dalai Lama fled in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule, and has since campaigned for self-rule from exile.