Supersonic bullets test graphene’s strength

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• Harder than diamond yet more elastic than rubber; tougher than steel yet lighter than aluminum. Graphene is the strongest known material.  To put this in perspective: if a sheet of cling film (like kitchen wrap film) had the same strength as a pristine monolayer of graphene, it would require the force exerted by a mass of 2000 kg, or a large car, to puncture it with a pencil.

• Graphene possesses other amazing characteristics: Its high electron mobility is 100x faster than silicon; it conducts heat 2x better than diamond; its electrical conductivity is 13x better than copper; it absorbs only 2.3% of reflecting light; it is impervious so that even the smallest atom (helium) can't pass through a defect-free monolayer graphene sheet; and its high surface area of 2630 square meters per gram means that with less than 3 grams you could cover an entire soccer field (well, practically speaking you would need 6 grams, since 2630 m2/g is the surface area for both sides of a graphene sheet).

• Graphene is the basic building block for other graphitic materials; it also represents a conceptually new class of materials that are only one atom thick, so-called two-dimensional (2D) materials (they are called 2D because they extends in only two dimensions: length and width; as the material is only one atom thick, the third dimension, height, is considered to be zero).