Colm Gorey, (Silicon Republic)

Physicists working in the weird field of quantum mechanics have managed to find a way to make the thinnest liquid films ever with help from graphene.

Many of us will be familiar with water droplets forming on our smartphones that are easy to brush off, but there is also the problem whereby after a shower our mirrors fog up and it’s a lot more difficult to remove the water.

Both of these realities are down to well-understood physics, but there is a third, mysterious possibility for how water interacts with a surface. Called ‘critical wetting’, it has been theorised since the 1950s, but no one had been able to determine whether it was actually real.

In this process, atoms of liquid would start to form a film on a surface, but then would stop building up when they were just a few atoms thick.

As it turns out, the discovery of the atom-thin wonder material graphene in 2010 was the perfect candidate to test critical wetting in the real world, and now it has contributed to a breakthrough scientific paper showcasing a newfound ability to create the thinnest liquid films ever.

In doing so, the breakthrough could allow for the engineering of a new class of surface coatings and lubricants just a few atoms thick.