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Carbon Electronics
which translates into ballistic transport on the submicrometre scale
An equally important reason for the interest in graphene is a
particular unique nature of its charge carriers. Although there is
nothing particularly relativistic about electrons moving around
carbon atoms, their interaction with the periodic potential of
graphene’s honeycomb lattice gives rise to new quasiparticles that,
at low energies E, are accurately described by the (2+1)-dimensional
Dirac equation with an effective speed of light vF
6
m
–1
s
–1
.
These quasiparticles, called “massless Dirac fermions,” can be ...