Physics and Astronomy Colloquium

Graphene, a new recently discovered allotrope of carbon, is the first example of truly two-dimensional crystals. It also demonstrates an exotic electron energy spectrum, with chiral states ("massless Dirac fermions"). This establishes some novel and unexpected relations with relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, such as chiral Klein tunneling in pnp junctions, vacuum reconstruction around charge impurities, appearance of topologically protected zero-energy chiral states, the Zitterbewegung of charge carriers, etc. Some phenomena hardly reachable in high-energy or nuclear physics experiments may be relatively easily simulated in graphene.