In 2004, two UK researchers shook the scientific world by making a revolutionary discovery. They made the thinnest material in the world, graphene, which is only one atom thick – or about one million times thinner than a sheet of paper, at this time it was the world’s strongest and most conductive material.

It turns out that a real-life world of two dimensions, inspired by the 1884 book “Flatland”, exists after all and that graphene is just one member of a much larger family of its two-dimensional inhabitants.

In this talk, we will explore what makes two-dimensional materials so unique, how can we make them and how can we use them to improve our future.