A slice of carbon could work wonders with chips

Move over silicon: the hottest new material in electronics could be sitting inside the humble pencil. At the Institute of Physics' Condensed Matter and Materials Physics conference at the University of Exeter on Thursday 20 and Friday 21 April, Andre Geim of the University of Manchester and his colleagues claim that graphite, the silvery black, soft form of carbon known for thousands of years, could yield a new generation of microelectronic devices, as well as unveiling unprecedented effects in quantum physics.