Prizes
The prizes behind the field
One Nobel Prize was given for two-dimensional materials. The others here were given for the work it stands on – none of them about 2D materials, none of them dispensable. Every citation is the official wording, and every entry says how long the prize took to arrive.
From paper to prize
All 10 prizes on one time line, each from the paper it rewards to the award.
- Quantised Hall effect: paper 1980, prize 1985,5 years
- Electron and scanning tunnelling microscopes: paper 1981, prize 1986,5 years
- Superconducting ceramics: paper 1986, prize 1987,1 year
- Fullerenes: paper 1985, prize 1996,11 years
- Fractional quantum Hall effect: paper 1982, prize 1998,16 years
- Semiconductor heterostructures: paper 1963, prize 2000,37 years
- Giant magnetoresistance: paper 1988, prize 2007,19 years
- Graphene: paper 2004, prize 2010,6 years
- Topological phases of matter: paper 1973, prize 2016,43 years
- Quantum dots: paper 1981, prize 2023,42 years
The prize for the material itself
One Nobel Prize has been awarded for work on a two-dimensional material. This is it.
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2010
Andre Geim ½ · Konstantin Novoselov ½ · Physics
“for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene”This is the prize this field is named after. The citation is carefully worded: it rewards experiments on graphene, not the prediction or the naming of it. Graphene’s band structure had been calculated in 1947, single layers had been seen in an electron microscope in 1962, and the word itself was proposed in 1986. What the 2004 work added was a way to get a single layer onto a substrate, find it, contact it and measure it – which turned a theoretician’s model system into something any laboratory could hold. Six years from paper to prize is unusually fast, and it is why so much of what follows in this field has happened since.
Awarded 6 years after the work · Novoselov, Geim and colleagues, Science 306, 666 · official record
What it was built on
The prizes that came first, in the order they were awarded – 9 of them. None is about 2D materials; each is something this field could not do without.
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1985
Klaus von Klitzing · Physics
“for the discovery of the quantized Hall effect”Why it matters here
The effect was found in a two-dimensional electron gas inside a silicon transistor, and it was the first demonstration that confining electrons to a plane produces something a bulk crystal cannot do at all. The quantisation is so exact that the quantum Hall resistance is now how the ohm is realised. Graphene shows the same effect with a half-integer sequence, and is the only material in which it has been measured at room temperature.
Awarded 5 years after the work · von Klitzing, Dorda and Pepper, Physical Review Letters 45, 494 · official record
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1986
Ernst Ruska ½ · Gerd Binnig ¼ · Heinrich Rohrer ¼ · Physics
“for his fundamental work in electron optics, and for the design of the first electron microscope; and for their design of the scanning tunneling microscope”Why it matters here
This is the prize for the instruments. Ruska’s electron microscope is the ancestor of the machines that image single atoms in a monolayer, and that knock them out again above the displacement threshold. The scanning tunnelling microscope is how moiré patterns, mirror twin boundaries and individual defects are seen and measured spectroscopically. Almost every atomic-resolution picture in this field comes from a descendant of one of the two.
Awarded 5 years after the work · the scanning tunnelling microscope of 1981; Ruska’s electron microscope dates from the 1930s · official record
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1987
J. Georg Bednorz ½ · K. Alexander Müller ½ · Physics
“for their important break-through in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials”Why it matters here
The cuprate superconductors are layered crystals: copper-oxygen planes separated by spacer layers, with the superconductivity living in the planes. They were the discovery that put a genuinely two-dimensional electronic problem at the centre of condensed matter physics, a decade before anyone isolated a single layer of anything. This prize also holds the modern record for impatience – it was awarded a year after the paper.
Awarded 1 year after the work · Bednorz and Müller, Zeitschrift für Physik B 64, 189 · official record
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1996
Robert F. Curl Jr. ⅓ · Sir Harold W. Kroto ⅓ · Richard E. Smalley ⅓ · Chemistry
“for their discovery of fullerenes”Why it matters here
C60 opened the family that graphene closes. A fullerene is a carbon sheet wrapped into a ball, a nanotube is the same sheet rolled into a cylinder, and graphene is the sheet left flat – the same honeycomb in zero, one and two dimensions. The decade of work on fullerenes and then nanotubes built the instruments, the community and the expectations that graphene arrived into.
Awarded 11 years after the work · Kroto, Heath, O’Brien, Curl and Smalley, Nature 318, 162 · official record
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1998
Robert B. Laughlin ⅓ · Horst L. Störmer ⅓ · Daniel C. Tsui ⅓ · Physics
“for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations”Why it matters here
Electrons confined to a plane and pushed by a large magnetic field act together so strongly that the things which carry charge through them carry a fraction of an electron’s. This is the direct ancestor of the fractional Chern insulators reported in twisted MoTe2 in 2023, which produce the same fractional states in a lattice with no magnetic field at all. Störmer turns up again in this story as a co-author of the 2005 measurement of the quantum Hall effect in graphene.
Awarded 16 years after the work · Tsui, Störmer and Gossard, Physical Review Letters 48, 1559 · official record
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2000
Zhores I. Alferov ¼ · Herbert Kroemer ¼ · Physics
“for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics”Why it matters here
The heterostructure is the idea that a device can be defined by the junction between two different semiconductors rather than by the bulk of one. Every van der Waals heterostructure is that idea with the hardest part removed: because the layers are only weakly bound, they do not have to share a lattice constant, so combinations that no epitaxial growth could ever produce can simply be stacked.
Awarded 37 years after the work · Alferov’s and Kroemer’s heterostructure work dates from the early 1960s; the other half of the prize went to Jack S. Kilby for the integrated circuit · official record
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2007
Albert Fert ½ · Peter Grünberg ½ · Physics
“for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance”Why it matters here
Giant magnetoresistance was found in stacks of alternating magnetic and non-magnetic layers a few atoms thick, and it became the read head in every hard disk within a decade. It is the precedent worth remembering: a technology built not on the properties of a bulk crystal but on those of an artificial stack of layers – which is exactly what is now being asked of 2D magnets.
Awarded 19 years after the work · Baibich and colleagues with Fert, and Grünberg’s group, both in Physical Review Letters in 1988 and 1989 · official record
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2016
David J. Thouless ½ · F. Duncan M. Haldane ¼ · J. Michael Kosterlitz ¼ · Physics
“for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter”Why it matters here
Three results, and all of them are two-dimensional. The Kosterlitz–Thouless transition showed how a two-dimensional system can order in a way the Mermin–Wagner theorem does not forbid, through vortices rather than alignment. The Thouless–Kohmoto–Nightingale–den Nijs argument identified the quantum Hall conductance as a topological invariant – the Chern number. And Haldane’s 1988 model produced a quantised Hall effect with no magnetic field, a construction he presented as an unlikely thought experiment, and which twisted moiré materials have since built.
Awarded 43 years after the work · Kosterlitz and Thouless in 1973, the Thouless-Kohmoto-Nightingale-den Nijs paper in 1982, and Haldane’s model in 1988 · official record
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2023
Moungi G. Bawendi ⅓ · Louis E. Brus ⅓ · Aleksey Yekimov ⅓ · Chemistry
“for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots”Why it matters here
Quantum dots are the same physics one dimension further in: confinement alone changes what a material absorbs and emits, with no change to its chemistry. It is the argument this whole field rests on, and the dots got there first – the colour of a quantum dot depends on its size in the way the band gap of a dichalcogenide depends on its layer count. They also show how long the road can be: forty-two years from the first observation to the prize, and about thirty from the first samples to a television screen.
Awarded 42 years after the work · Ekimov from 1981, Brus from 1983, and Bawendi’s controlled synthesis from 1993 · official record
What a prize does not tell you
A prize is shared by at most three people, and it is not awarded posthumously. Everything done by students, collaborators and the people who built the instruments is compressed into three names: the 2004 paper behind the graphene prize has eight authors, and two of them received it.
The delay is not a measure of anything. A year passed between the cuprate paper and its prize, six years for graphene, and forty-three between the Kosterlitz–Thouless papers and the prize that recognised them. A field with a recent prize is not a young field.
A prize recognises a discovery, not a technology. Graphene’s came in 2010, and whether graphene electronics will be useful is a separate question that this site tries to keep separate.
And a prize marks a moment rather than a beginning. Graphene’s band structure was calculated in 1947 and single layers were photographed in 1962; the milestones on Basics run from 1859.