Not wanting to ruin a good joke, is this because imperfections in the alignment of otherwise pure substances provide opportunistic "holes" in structure for things like van der waals forces to work their magic?
I am reminded of the "you can develop photos with a banana and a spoon" (not really) stories, which underline the fundamentals of what photographic development is: a chemistry story which is not about the substances as much as about how base and acids combine. The photoreactive chemicals are highly specific, but the process of fixing them, and binding visible molecules to them or not, is more general.
Maybe the role of "contaminants" in graphine is similar? Not what it is, but what it DOES.
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Not wanting to ruin a good joke, is this because imperfections in the alignment of otherwise pure substances provide opportunistic "holes" in structure for things like van der waals forces to work their magic?
I am reminded of the "you can develop photos with a banana and a spoon" (not really) stories, which underline the fundamentals of what photographic development is: a chemistry story which is not about the substances as much as about how base and acids combine. The photoreactive chemicals are highly specific, but the process of fixing them, and binding visible molecules to them or not, is more general.
Maybe the role of "contaminants" in graphine is similar? Not what it is, but what it DOES.