Graphene ‘gold’: MIT finds new properties in pencil lead

By Rizwan Choudhury

A team of physicists from MIT has achieved a remarkable feat: They have transformed ordinary graphite, the material used in pencils, into a novel material with three extraordinary properties never seen before in natural graphite.

The new material, pentalayer rhombohedral stacked graphene, is made of five ultrathin layers of graphene stacked in a specific order. Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb pattern. It is one of the thinnest and strongest materials known to science.