When one writes with a pencil, thin flakes of graphite are left on the surface. Some of them are only one angstrom thick and can be viewed as individual atomic planes extracted from bulk graphite. Until two years ago, this strictly 2D material called graphene was presumed not to exist.
I will discuss our work on graphene concentrating on its electronic properties which are governed by quantum relativistic physics rather than by standard physics based on the Schrödinger equation.