Philip Kim would have won the Nobel Prize in physics but for an error in the Nobel Committee’s understanding of Kim’s role in graphene research, believe peers, including one of the Nobel recipients.
A Scientific American article scrutinized the quality of the documents issued in October by the committee as its rationale for awarding the prize to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester in the U.K. “for groundbreaking experiments regarding graphene.” The actual prize will be awarded December 8.
The research of Kim and the award winners involved graphene, sheets of carbon atoms only a single atom thick and more flexible and lighter than other semiconductor materials. Graphene is recognized as offering great promise for use in chipmaking.
Several misstatements in the document have been noted by researchers like physicist Walter de Heer of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and Geim, one of the Physics Nobel winners. “[Kim] made an important contribution and I would gladly have shared the prize with him,” said Geim.
Kim himself has denigrated the significance of the error as being determinative in the Nobel award. “The philosophy behind the Nobel Prize is that they give special credit to the first finders,” he explained. “The first paper of the recipients carved the way for followers, including myself.” Kim, 43, is a physics professor at New York’s Columbia University.
