title: 1963-2003 — Name, epitaxy, near misses description: Graphene gets a name. Monolayers sit on metals and SiC. Platelet patents arrive before 2004. tags:
- timeline
Evidence: Well-supported historical papers. Not “graphene was invented in 2004” and not “2004 was nothing.”
Naming
Mid-1980s, often cited as 1986: Boehm, Setton, Stumpp and colleagues fix graphene as the systematic name for a single graphite sheet (graphite + -ene). The word is older in talk; this is the nomenclature paper trail. 1962 · glossary
Epitaxy that is real and stuck
- Metal surfaces: monolayer carbon on Ni, Ru, Pt and cousins through the 1960s–1990s surface-science literature (LEED, AES, later STM). Land, Michely, Behm-type STM on Ru is the picture people remember from the early 1990s.
- SiC: Van Bommel, Crombeen, Van Tooren, Surf. Sci. (1975) — heating SiC sublimes Si and leaves carbon-rich layers. That is epitaxial graphene on a wafer, usually not a gated flake on SiO₂.
These layers matter. They are a different object from the 2004 transferred/exfoliated FET. 2004
Theory weather
Mermin–Wagner style arguments about strict 2D crystals get flattened in pop histories into “physicists thought graphene was impossible.” The constraint is subtler (anharmonicity, substrate, finite size). Log the ideal: theories.
Early-2000s industry
Nano graphene platelet / single-sheet process filings (US groups later sold as Angstron, Vorbeck, XG-class names) show companies in the file cabinet before the Science paper. That is companies, not a reason to delete 2004.
What this stretch is not
Not a consumer product line. Not ISO vocabulary (that is 2017). Not a transistor you buy.