There was a meeting at Marunouchi, the centre of Tokyo, to discuss how to organize some physics conference. The meeting was held in the Saturday afternoon when a typhoon was approaching to Tokyo. Not a soul was to be seen in the street, which is usually busy with lots of business people.
Before the meeing, I had a lunch in La Botique de Joel Robuchon, a French-style cafe run by a French chef. A piece of quiche with anchovy and pain au curry were what I bought with a cup of coffee. They tasted good.
Unlike the street, quite a number of customers were inside the cafe, enjoying the calm rainy day in the heart of Tokyo. The storm was expected to approach most closely in the evening, so that there were still some time to enjoy the atmosphere until all the trains in Tokyo would be suspended due to strong wind and heavy rain.
Before entering this cafe, I considered to take out and eat in the meeting room. But I changed my mind for the warm and quite place. Outside was very dark even though it was just after the noon. Rain was pouring. It was like a day in Europe. To tell the truth, I realised that I don't dislike rainy days very much if there is a nice cafe to have a seat and stay peacefully.
In the meeting, there was a discussion on graphene, which were the subject to have won the Nobel prize for physics this year. I wondered why graphene won the prize instead of nanotube, when the announcement of the winners was made. Today's discussion was among theoreticians, but I found a good reason why graphene is more worthwhile than nanotube.
As mentioned before, graphene is a two-dimensional physical system. There are actually many two-dimensional systems which were recently awarded the physics Nobel prize. The quantum Hall effect in semiconductors under a strong magnetic field, and Bose-Einstein condensate of ultra-cold dilute atomic gases are such examples. I learned in the meeting that graphene is a strongly correlated many-electrons system in 2D space, where the perturbative approach is useless. In this sense, graphene should be classified as one of the hottest physical subjects in the modern physics. I guess that some breakthrough was made recently by the prize winners in its theory and experimental study, which allow graphene to be applicable in the engineering.
I started to be interested in this new 2D system from that point of view: strongly correlated many-body systems.
