Equilibrium Networks

Whenever I browse the cond-mat archive these days I’m constantly amazed at the number of papers dealing with graphene. And a lot of them look really interesting, for example this one from yesterday. There’s a lot of interest among theorists and experimentalists in graphene as an experimentally accessible substrate for two-dimensional quantum field theory, and there’s a lot of ways in which this material might be applied, especially in electronics.

A quick lookup shows the growth of papers in cond-mat with “graphene” in the title took over a year to take off since the first big paper dealing with it, but boy did it take off:

The number for 2009 is a projection that assumes a constant rate of papers per month in a given year (i.e., 458 papers so far should lead to about 643 for 2009).

The interesting thing to me about this graph is that it looks like a logistic. This is what you’d expect the dissemination of information to behave like, and my eighth-grade science project was on modeling the spread of rumors this way. On the other hand, the graph also looks like part of a Gaussian (though the eyeball fit doesn’t look as good, I won’t bother with numerics in either case since there’s not very good data), but graphene research is almost certainly not a flash in the pan–there are too many potential applications. But since the inflection point has been passed I think it may be time to consider graphene as a distinct discipline within condensed matter theory.