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Single layer carbon, or Graphene is a very interesting material to scientists. It’s two dimensional structure opens the door to many interesting physical effects and would allow electric circuits to be made smaller than ever before. On top of that it’s tough, flexible, conductive, and made from one of the most abundant elements so it has the potential to be cheap.

But most of all it is young! It was theoretically described as far back as 1962, but no-one thought it could be made experimentally. Until 2004 when a group working in Manchester and Russia achieved the (seemingly) impossible with nothing more than some graphite flakes (similar to your pencil lead) some blank silicon wafers and scotch tape. Science!

So now we have this new material, it has amazing properties and it’s easy(ish) to make. Brilliant! But we don’t know very much about it. We have to do all the tests. Science knows almost everything there is to know about water, and iron, and wood because those things have been known for millennia. We’ve done the tests. Even so we are still finding new experiments to find out new things about our most ordinary materials. Well with graphene we still have all the work to do and, oh boy, people are. I am a small part of that.

I look at a system of very, very small (1000 times smaller than a hair-width) dots made of a magnetic metal called cobalt on top of graphene. I pass electrical current through the graphene while applying a magnetic field to the graphene and cobalt. I also cool my samples down to very low temperatures (around -220 degrees) because at low temperatures everything calms down and becomes easier to decipher. Certain effects only become visible at temperatures close to absolute zero, any hotter and there is just too much noise.

From looking at the behaviour of my graphene and cobalt system I can learn about graphene and also figure out ways to better use graphene in real life devices like your phone or your computer. The more we know the more we can imagine.

There really is no typical day for me. Some weeks I am fabricating my samples which means long hours in clean rooms using electron beams and chemicals and hoping that I don’t make a mistake and destroy hours of work and hundreds of euro.

The next day I might be preparing my finished samples for measurement which involves peering into a microscope and making my hands as steady as possible while I bond a hair thin wire to an area the size of a pin-point. Also pumps and vacuum chambers which are all kinds of fun.

Then a week of measuring. If my sample is alive I have to do as many tests on it as possible before it dies. Electrical systems can be as delicate as biological systems that way. I might test a sample for up to a month with each set of measurements giving me ideas for further test to do. Sometimes in science there is such a thing as too much data, it can be difficult to narrow your field of focus when you are seeing 3 or 4 effects happening in your sample. It is important to test in the right way and I spend as much time thinking about and discussing my tests as doing them.

After I collect all the data I can think of – well, I have to look at it. I have to graph it up and run it through formulae and programs and my own brain to see what I have. It’s the most scientific part of my week.

In a way my “typical days” are representative of the scientific process. You must devise your experiment, collect your data, and analyse! In other words: How? What? Why?