In recent months, a new sense of excitement has spread through the graphene research community. These guys are no longer focused on what they can do with single layers of carbon chickenwire. Instead they have a more ambitious plan.

The new goal is to take single layers of high quality graphene and pile them on top of each other to create what physicists call van der Waals heterostructures, layer cakes of carbon crystals each just a single atom thick that promise to behave in entirely new ways. The hope is that this will open the way to undreamt of applications in superconductivity, semiconductor physics and so on.