Profs Geim and Novoselov will play a leading role in guiding the collaborative effort.

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Nobel Prize laureate Professor Kostya Novoselov intends to use a sink, discovered intact in the excavations, in the institute when it opens in 2015.

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The material, so thin it effectively has just two dimensions, was first isolated by two Russian-born scientists, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, at the University of Manchester, work that earned them a Nobel Prize and knighthoods.

BBC: Europe gives 2bn euros to science

In one of such sessions, together with his doctoral student Konstantin Novoselov, he used a piece of ordinary sticky tape (which allegedly they found in a bin) to peel off a very thin layer of graphite, taken from a pencil.

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Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, of the University of Manchester, made graphene in 2004 using what may be the simplest experiment ever to win a Nobel prize: they peeled it off the surface of a piece of graphite using sticky tape.

ECONOMIST: The 2010 Nobel prizes