In 2007, then MS student Gian Guzman-Verri (now a PhD student at University of California, Riverside) discovered that a single-layer sheet of silicon can have so-called electronic Dirac cones, a property that has made graphene world-famous and led to the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. The flat sheet of silicon was named "silicene" in a paper published by Guzman-Verri and his advisor, Dr. Lew Yan Voon, in the prestigious Physics Review B.
This discovery has now been reported around the world in many online forums such as
