Graphene: the game changer?

C 2012 American Chemical Society Graphene: The Game Changer? I t has only been eight years since the isolation of graphene 1 and over a year since the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics was jointly awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.” Nevertheless, the number of graphene publications is still rapidly growing. The American Physical Society condensed matter physics journals (Applied Physics Letters, Physical Review B, Physical Review Letters) have published the largest number of graphene papers to date, but in recent years, there has been a surge of papers in leading American Chemical Society nanoscience and nanotechnology journals (ACS Nano, Journal of Physical Chemistry C,Nano Letters). This is not surprising since graphene first captured the attention of physicists due to the novel transport properties of its carriers behaving as massless Dirac fermions. In addition, graphene is the thinnest, strongest material known, is highly transparent, and has high electrical and thermal conductivity. Hence, in recent years, chemists, materials scientists, and nanoscientists have been actively looking for applications andways to enhance graphene's properties through functionalization or by forming hybrids and composites that incorporate graphene. At ACS Nano, we have observed a surge in the number of graphene manuscript submissions. Many of these manuscripts are certainly publishable and would have been reviewed in ACS Nano even a year ago; however, we now regularly have to turn away many manuscripts without review as there are related published papers in the literature, and ACS Nano aims to publish novel ground-breaking research of broad interest. Many groups all over the world are doing exciting work using graphene and its hybrids in applications such as supercapacitors, fuel cells, batteries, photocatalysis, photovoltaics, chemical and biosensors, photonics, and optoelectronics.