Fine Structure Constant Defines Visual Transparency of Graphene

By R. Nair, P. Blake, A. Grigorenko, K. Novoselov, T. Booth, T. Stauber, N. M. R. Peres, A.K. Geim. Science, 2008

6,900 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There are few phenomena in condensed matter physics that are defined only by the fundamental constants and do not depend on material parameters. Examples are the resistivity quantum, h/e2 (h is Planck's constant and e the electron charge), that appears in a variety of transport experiments and the magnetic flux quantum, h/e, playing an important role in the physics of superconductivity. By and large, sophisticated facilities and special measurement conditions are required to observe any of these phenomena. We show that the opacity of suspended graphene is defined solely by the fine structure constant, a = e2/hc � 1/137 (where c is the speed of light), the parameter that describes coupling between light and relativistic electrons and that is traditionally associated with quantum electrodynamics rather than materials science. Despite being only one atom thick, graphene is found to absorb a significant (pa = 2.3%) fraction of incident white light, a consequence of graphene's unique electronic structure.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/917dbf11415660db29be030325153cf70103724f

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Citations in the corpus

Electronic transport in two-dimensional graphene (2010, methodology): “, 2008) and by measuring the absorption of suspended graphene sheets (Nair et al., 2008).”
Graphene plasmonics for tunable terahertz metamaterials. (2011, background): “in electrical transport to a universal absorption constan”
Monolayer graphene as a saturable absorber in a mode-locked laser (2010, background): “Comparatively less effort has been dedicated to investigate the photonic properties and applications of graphene, although graphene shows exciting potential in ultrafast photonics devices because of its ultrafast carrier dynamics [3, 4] and large, broadband optical absorption (2.3% per layer) [5, 6”
Quantized circular photogalvanic effect in Weyl semimetals (2016, background): “The principle that quantized effects can exist in metallic systems is demonstrated by graphene, where for a broad range of frequencies the transmission of incident light is 1 − α, where α = e(2)/4π~c 0 is the fine structure constant [10].”
Production, properties and potential of graphene (2010, methodology): “From [201], Reprinted with permission from AAAS; (b) Reproduced with permission from [109], MacMillan Publishers Ltd: Nature Nanotechnology, copyright (2008)”