Graphane

Graphite is a common mineral composed entirely of carbon. It's the mineral used in pencil "lead." Graphite is composed of a series of sheets of graphene stacked on top of each other. When you write, individual sheets come off and stick to the paper. If you do this in a controlled way, it's possible to create a relatively large surface of just graphene. Graphene has all sorts of interesting electronic and conductive properties. Like graphite, it's fairly chemically inert, which is both good and bad. It's good because it makes materials made from graphene more likely to be practical in real applications where they will be subjected to chemical stress. It's bad because it means that there's fairly little you can do with graphene sheets to alter their properties.

Except that now researchers at Manchester University have discovered a hydrogenation process which turns graphene into graphane. Graphene is made of an infinite sheet of sp2 carbons - something like infinite sheets of interlocked benzene. Using what the researches called a "cold plasma" they have managed to hydrogenate the graphene surface, turning the sp2 carbons into sp3. The new material is also stable at room temperature, but it is possible to remove the hydrogens and regenerate the graphene layer.

The process, as it exists is fairly crude -- very high energy hydrogen is required and there is little or no control over sites of hydrogenation. But if something like the common catalytic hydrogenation taught in basic organic chemistry is possible, then it might be possible to create architecture on the graphene surface, which could lead to a variety of new electronic or physical properties.





http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/323/5914/610