Abstract:

Properties of living and non-living matter, complex and often incomprehensible, seem to arise from a combination of only a few types of chemical bonds among atoms. One such `sp2 bond' among carbon atoms does wonders in simple graphene, a basic component of our pencil tip. Graphene, a two dimensional net of just carbon atoms, has caught the attention of physics community recently, through its surprising variety of quantum mechanical behavior. We will get a glimpse of the quantum complexity. After a review I will focus our own predictions of certain novel behavior in graphene, i) Lorentz contraction and time dilatation like phenomena [1], in a totally non-relativistic context and ii) 2 channel Kondo effect [2] and iii) room temperature superconductivity [3] in charged graphene.

[1] V. Lukose, R. Shankar and GB, Phys. Rev. Lett., 98, 116802 (2007)
[2] K. Sengupta and GB, Phys. Rev. B 77, 045417 (2007)
[3] S. Pathak, V. Shenoy and GB, Phys. Rev., B 81, 085431 (2010)