San Sebastián may be famous for its food and cultural life, but what drew me to the pearl of the Basque country last week happened in an anonymous conference centre, sealed off from the surfers on the beach outside. I was there on a mission: to wrap my head around the current state of the buzzing field of 2D materials.
With some 250 speakers across multiple parallel tracks — and with most presentations veering deep into technical territory — much necessarily passed both above and beside me. This post, then, makes no attempt to capture the full sprawl of Graphene2025. What follows is simply a personal slice of impressions and loosely connected nuggets of insight. Here goes.
What’s in a Name?
One of the first things that struck me in San Sebastián was how outdated the name of the conference now feels. Graphene still looms large over the field — but it’s no longer the whole story. Nearly two decades after Geim and Novoselov isolated a single layer of carbon atoms with the help of Scotch tape, the catalogue of ultra-thin materials has ballooned into something closer to a periodic jungle.
If you squint a little, you can still sort this growing 2D family tree into three broad branches: elemental materials, compounds, and heterostructures.
The first group includes the old classics — graphene itself, prized for its electrical conductivity; phosphorene, a semiconductor; and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), which insulates electrically but conducts heat. There’s also a long tail of more exotic monolayers: silicene, germanene, antimonene — materials with fabulous names and (for now) more speculative properties.
The second group, compounds, is dominated by the transition metal dichalcogenides, or TMDs. You might have seen their abbreviations — MoS₂, WS₂, MoSe₂, WSe₂ — scrawled across lab whiteboards or slid past you in Nature abstracts. Unlike graphene, most of these are semiconducting, which makes them particularly interesting for applications in electronics, photonics and sensing.
The third category is arguably the most mind-bending: heterostructures. Here, different 2D materials are stacked on top of one another like atomic-scale Lego. Since the layers are held together not by chemical bonds but by van der Waals forces — think of them as the molecular equivalent of gentle static cling — they can be combined without scrambling each other’s internal structure. The beauty of this approach is its modularity: one layer might conduct electricity (like graphene), the next could be semiconducting (say, MoS₂), and the one above that an insulator (such as hBN). By carefully choosing and stacking these ultra-thin layers, researchers can craft materials with entirely new properties that none of the individual components possess on their own.
This kind of synthetic versatility has opened up a rich playground for experimentation — and has become something of a cornerstone for next-generation material design. It was also the focus of Nobel laureate Konstantin Novoselov’s talk at the conference. A co-discoverer of graphene, he has since turned his attention to exploring the combinatorial promise of “vdW materials”, sketching out a future where the periodic table gives way to a new kind of architected matter: built not atom by atom, but layer by layer.
From Hype to Holding Pattern : The Rise and Stall of Graphene’s First Use Cases
Once you start asking what 2D materials are for, the answers expand quickly.
In the early days — when graphene caught all the limelight — the conversation largely centred on two spectacular properties. First: its extraordinary electrical conductivity, which spurred visions of ultra-fast, ultra-small electronics. Second: its mechanical strength. Measured per weight, graphene is some 200 times stronger than steel by weight, making it a tantalising candidate for reinforcing rubber, concrete, plastics — anything, really, that could use a hidden backbone.
To some extent, both promises have delivered — though not equally. You’ll now find graphene quietly added to composite materials where it improves thermal and electrical performance: corrosion-resistant coatings, heat-spreading films, even a few items of high-end sports equipment. But in the more glamorous world of electronics, things haven’t quite gone according to plan. The lack of a bandgap — a key feature for digital switches — has hampered graphene’s ability to replace silicon in logic components. Here, other 2D materials, especially the semiconducting TMDs (transition metal dichalcogenides), have emerged as better-suited alternatives.
Too Much and Not Enough : The Paradoxes of Graphene Supply
A familiar refrain surfaced again and again at Graphene2025: at least for bulk graphene — powders and flakes — supply has outpaced demand. Production lines are humming, warehouses are stocked — but the market isn’t quite there yet. It’s a pattern familiar from past materials revolutions — undeniable potential, but a slower, messier path to real adoption.
Then again, as ever, it’s not quite that simple.
In one of the more practically-minded talks, Sainathan Nagarathanam of Tata Steel presented the opposite perspective: their main barrier to commercialisation wasn’t a lack of use cases, but the absence of reliably sourced, quality-controlled graphene. Their projects were being held back not by market pessimism, but by the inability to procure consistent material at industrial scale.
That contradiction — surplus in some places, shortage in others — points to a deeper immaturity in the ecosystem. It’s not the amount of graphene that’s the bottleneck, but the lack of standardisation, certification, and trustworthy supply chains. Graphene might be abundant in principle, but from an engineering point of view, it’s still hard to specify.
At the same time, a handful of projects are taking things in a different direction entirely. Rather than chase ultimate performance, they’re foregrounding sustainability. One standout was presented by Hjalmar Granberg from RISE, who’s working on converting lignocellulose — that is, plant biomass — into a graphene-like conductive material using laser treatment. It’s not clear whether this is a solution to a real problem or a clever detour. But it served as a reminder that the story of 2D materials isn’t just about edge-of-the-envelope performance. It’s also about rethinking how we source and produce high-functioning materials — maybe even from waste.
A Toolkit, Not a Wonder-Material
If graphene was once marketed as a wonder-material — hyped to revolutionise everything from electronics to concrete — the mood at Graphene2025 was more grounded. The talks reflected a subtle but important shift: from headline-grabbing potential to specific, application-driven development. Instead of asking what can this material do?, many researchers now ask what material fits this need?
It’s a framing I appreciated — and one that helped crystallise a loose thread I hadn’t quite pulled on. I’ve been circling around photonics for a while, but it wasn’t until this conference that I understood just how central 2D materials have become to the field.
A case in point: TMDs are gaining traction as highly responsive semiconductors in applications like photodetectors, IR sensing, and modular photonic circuitry. Their bandgap properties make them ideal for optoelectronic tasks where graphene falls short.
Which brings us to one of the more cinematic moments of the conference.
Seeing Red
Valentyn S. Volkov, co-founder of the Dubai-based startup XPANCEO, took the stage to present what can only be described as a sci-fi object: a smart contact lens built on 2D materials.
Volkov isn’t your average startup founder — he’s a seasoned researcher with over 9,000 citations and a h-index in the mid-40s. His company has already published in Nature Communications, and boasts a scientific advisory board that includes Konstantin Novoselov.
XPANCEO have raised a $40 million seed round, and during the talk, Volkov showed early prototypes of their contact lens, which aims to integrate an improbable list of features: biosensing for eye pressure and biomarkers, colour blindness correction, infrared vision, interface navigation via eye movement, and — most strikingly — optical zoom, right on the lens.
Some of these were demonstrated in rudimentary form at the booth. Others remain closer to aspiration. Volkov was candid about this when we spoke after his talk: the technology is still at a low TRL. A commercial product may launch in 2026, but much of the headline functionality lies further out. Still, the sense of science fiction made tactile was hard to shake.
What’s most striking, perhaps, isn’t the zoom or the IR-sensing — it’s that even these early prototypes already incorporate more than fifty distinct 2D materials. According to Volkov, that number keeps rising as new functional layers are stacked. It’s a reminder of how radically modular the 2D approach can be: a library of atomic building blocks, each with its own photonic, electronic, or chemical properties.
Which brings us to two of the stranger words in the 2D vocabulary: valleytronics and twistronics.
The former encodes information in the ‘valleys’ — local minima in a material’s band structure — and uses circularly polarised light or electric fields to manipulate them. Certain monolayer TMDs are uniquely suited for this, allowing excitons to be selectively excited in specific valleys. It’s a new kind of optoelectronic coding, not based on charge or spin, but on position in an energy landscape.
The latter — twistronics — is the art of stacking two atom-thin layers with a small rotational offset. When the angle is just right (typically under two degrees), a moiré superlattice forms, giving rise to emergent quantum behaviours like superconductivity or Mott insulation. Initially explored with graphene-graphene stacks, twistronics now includes materials like hBN and various TMDs, with the goal of engineering custom electronic or optical states.
Both fields remain mostly in the lab — but the ambition is clear. As several speakers noted, these are not boutique curiosities. They’re potential pillars for future quantum systems, advanced sensors, and new kinds of computation.
Printing Power
A more grounded application — but one with potentially massive impact — comes in the form of supercapacitors. Unlike conventional batteries, which store energy via chemical reactions, supercapacitors work electrostatically — by building up a charge separation between two electrodes. This makes them remarkably fast: they can charge and discharge in fractions of a second, survive hundreds of thousands of cycles, and perform reliably even in extreme cold.
What that means: your phone could top up in seconds. Your smartwatch might never need replacing. And your car’s energy system could absorb or deliver power spikes without degrading like a lithium cell would.
The technology has been under investigation for decades, but it’s struggled to break through commercially, due to limited energy density, and fabrication methods that don’t scale. Enter 2D materials — with their enormous surface-area-to-volume ratios and excellent conductivity — as a potential game-changer.
Many research teams are now exploring this potential, but one project stands out: RiC2D, led by professor Hassan Arafat at Khalifa University. It’s taken concrete steps toward industrial readiness.
RiC2D uses electrohydrodynamic (EHD) printing to build porous electrode layers with micron precision. Inks made from graphene, MXenes, and carbon nanotubes are printed layer by layer, enabling energy storage to be embedded directly where it’s needed — onto wearable chips, implantable sensors, or thin devices with no added bulk. In earlier studies, RiC2D has reported areal capacitance up to 1,450 mF/cm² — several times higher than today’s commercial microsupercapacitors. That means more energy stored per square millimetre — ideal for ultra-compact electronics.
While TRL wasn’t stated explicitly, the signs are strong: printed prototypes have been tested in relevant environments, industrial partners are onboard, and a path to production has been outlined. Notably, RiC2D is collaborating with Sungkyunkwan University and South Korean company ENJET — a partnership that signals both technological maturity and commercial intent. It’s one of the clearest signs from the conference that 2D-material energy tech may be approaching primetime.
Wired for Thought
The list of futuristic applications could go on — from water purification and environmental sensing to quantum photonic circuits and atom-thin battery components — but I’d like to end with something else. A use case where 2D materials might not just enhance our technologies, but alter the conditions of being human.
I’m thinking of bioelectronics — and in particular, neural interfaces.
If you’ve heard of this field at all, it’s probably thanks to Elon Musk’s Neuralink — the brain–computer interface company best known for its ambitious goal of merging minds and machines. But at the conference, a different approach came into focus: INBRAIN Neuroelectronics, a Spanish company working to treat neurological disorders using graphene-based electrodes. Where Neuralink chases a future of generalised brain–machine fusion, INBRAIN is focused on precise, clinically targeted neuromodulation — less science fiction, more science.
A spin-out from the European Graphene Flagship, INBRAIN is developing graphene-based electrodes for brain implants — ultrathin, flexible, highly conductive films that can be placed directly against neural tissue with minimal disruption. Unlike many conventional implant materials, which rely on stiff metals or synthetic polymers, graphene offers a rare combination of mechanical compliance, electrical performance, and biocompatibility.
The company has already completed a first-in-human implantation study and is now targeting clinical applications in conditions like Parkinson’s, epilepsy, and dementia. It’s a quiet but remarkable example of how 2D materials aren’t just improving circuits — they’re beginning to interface with the nervous system itself.
Naturally, the idea of putting graphene into the body raises questions about toxicity and biodegradability. But here, too, the field has made strides. Research led by Bengt Fadeel at the Karolinska Institute has shown that graphene oxide — depending on its structure and functionalisation — can be broken down by the immune system, and that it may, in some forms, be less cytotoxic than carbon nanotubes or other advanced materials.
None of this means the ethical questions are settled. But it does suggest that a future with soft, adaptable, biologically integrated electronics is no longer a distant thought experiment. Neural interfaces made from 2D materials are already entering the clinic — for some patients, that future is now.
Layered Histories
As with most conferences, some of the most insightful moments happened not on stage but over coffee — in the gaps between sessions, where people dropped their guard and spoke more freely.
One such moment came in conversation with Andrew Strudwick of Manchester University’s Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre. He mentioned that their facility boasts excellent roll-to-roll capabilities for CVD-based production — but doesn’t work with epitaxy. The irony? Strudwick himself did his PhD in epitaxy. And in his view, Sweden is quietly leading the charge in this area.
That remark offered a more layered map than the usual dichotomy between composite powders and nanoelectronics. Within the electronics pathway, the divergence between CVD and epitaxy suggests multiple routes forward, each with its own requirements when it comes to crystal structure, substrate integration, and material purity.
And it’s in this technological tension that the longer arc of material history starts to reveal itself.
Epitaxy isn’t new. Nor are many of the materials now grouped under the 2D umbrella. TMDs were used in bulk form well before they became monolayer celebrities. MXenes trace their lineage back to the so-called MAX phases — ternary carbides and nitrides first studied in the 1990s.
This new wave, in other words, isn’t only about discovering new things. It’s about shrinking them, reconfiguring them, and occasionally rediscovering what was already there. That blend of continuity and reorientation might explain why the 2D materials landscape remains so difficult to pin down. It’s less a rupture than a reshuffling — a reminder that revolutions sometimes happen in layers.
Soft Signals
By the end of the week, my notebook was full and my thoughts a little scrambled. The science had been dense, the pace relentless, and I’d long since let go of any ambition to follow it all. But that was never the point. I hadn’t come to master the field — only to get a feel for its texture, its momentum, its mood.
And what lingered most wasn’t the technology. It was the tone.
I’d arrived with a quiet suspicion — the sense that this conference might feel just like every other: densely packed with brilliant men talking too fast. But something was different. There was more space in the room. More women on stage. More listening. More willingness to admit not knowing. In a field still finding its shape, tone is culture — and culture shapes what gets built.