Broschüre EMFL English

16 Sir Konstantin Novoselov, who, together with Sir Andre Geim, was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the two-dimensional version of carbon, which is now known as graphene, was a Ph. D. student at the Dutch EMFL site, the High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Radboud University in Nijmegen. He recalls the days when he first arrived from Russia in 1999: »The magnet lab was a really buzzing community. International, young, friendly, a range of available projects, visitors with exciting experiments and techniques you had never heard of before, and complex equipment, which always required an extra bit of imagin- ation. All you needed to do was to keep your eyes wide open (espe- cially because my supervisor at the time – Andre Geim – is one in a million) and learn. The group put together by Jan Kees Maan really pushed you hard, with everybody being at the same time support- ive yet informal, demanding yet encouraging – from Ph.D. students and post-docs all the way to technicians and academics. A good example was our movie club. We had to start the club ses- sions fairly late. For one, because we typically ran our experiments until late, but also because we essentially had to break into one of the auditoriums with a data projector. These get-togethers, which also attracted people from other groups and departments, quickly transformed into heated discussion forums about anything and everything: science, politics, movies, relationships, etc. Later, when I was already in Manchester, I always enjoyed my visits to Nijmegen, where I could conduct my experiments in high magnetic fields. Helpful and hard-working staff made those visits even more enjoyable. In 2005, we took our first graphene device over to the magnet lab and obtained detailed measurements of the quantum Hall effect in this material. High fields allowed us to observe this effect even at room temperatures, which was the topic of our publication in the journal Science in 2007.« © Gerard Verschooten

Broschüre EMFL English

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