One of the notable things at this year’s APS is the lack of buzz about graphene. Ever since it made it’s APS debut in 2006 at the Baltimore meeting, the activity — and number of parallel sessions — on this material has grown and grown. The graphene audience in Denver 2007 was about twice that in Baltimore. And at New Orleans 2008 twice again. And last year in Pittsburgh bigger again.

That’s a lot of growth. And of course unsustainable. So I figured it had to level out this year. But it’s more than levelled, the buzz seems to be on the wane.

Why? Is it simply a matter of hype’s short life span?

There’s still plenty more to do. There are plenty of new results emerging and much about it’s electronic behaviour that we don’t understand. We haven’t hit any roadblocks in synthesizing or building devices from graphene (unlike nanotubes, whose potential now seems all but dead).

Maybe it’s the theorists?

When graphene hit the headlines, the theorists hit their blackboards. Most had been working on carbon nanotubes, which are essentially just rolled-up graphene sheets, so the theoretical tools they’d developed over nearly two decades were directly transferrable. And by 2006 new ideas in nanotubes were already starting to dry up. And literally hundreds of new graphene papers began rolling off theorists’ computers every week.

Although isolating graphene is as easy as peeling a ribbon of sticky tape from a chunk of graphite, it took a good year or two before significant numbers of experimental papers started coming. But when they did a similar flood emerged. And by New Orleans in 2008, pretty much the entire nanotube community — which was a large community — had moved into graphene. But the production of experimental results was never as ponderous as that of theory.

So has graphene theory finally tapered off? Or have researchers found a new bandwagon? Topological insulators, perhaps?

UPDATE
My learned colleague Geoff Brumfiel has suggested that my spreading of rumours of graphene’s demise might be premature. He’s probably right. Here’s a photographic representation of how Andre Geim’s “Graphene Update” talk was received.

But I still maintain that nanotubes are looking decided ill. In searching for Geim’s talk, I accidentally ended up in the carbon nanotube session next door. And this is was it looked like.