Graphene may turn out to be the Lady Gaga of materials: it seems to have come from nowhere, everybody's talking about it, and before long it's going to be absolutely everywhere.

Although the material has been around for a while in concept, the first commercial products based on the material are due in the next few years - it's an incredibly lightweight and resistant material.

Graphene could lead to rollable phones, thousand-gigahertz processors and other miraculous things, and in a fairly short space of time it could be as ubiquitous as plastic. So what on Earth is it?

Graphene comes from graphite

Graphene comes from graphite, which means it's made from carbon atoms. It's two-dimensional rather than three-dimensional: a sheet of graphene is a grid of carbon atoms that's just one atom thick. Nobel laureate Andre Geim, who shared the Nobel Prize in physics with his colleague Konstantin Novoselov, explains: "Graphene is a single plane of graphite that has to be pulled out of bulk graphite to show its amazing properties."

It's British

Not really. But the two researchers who shared last year's Nobel Prize in physics for their work on graphene are from the University of Manchester.

Graphene comes from space aliens

Conspiracy theorists believe that graphene is a material left on Earth by - or rather, stolen from - space aliens. The theory reckons it's no coincidence that the theory behind graphene was first published in 1947, just when the US was dismantling UFOs in Roswell.

Why people are getting excited about it

"It's the thinnest possible material you can imagine," Geim told Nature. "It also has the largest surface-to-weight ratio: with one gram of graphene you can cover several football pitches (in Manchester, you know, we measure surface area in football pitches). It's also the strongest material ever measured; it's the stiffest material we know; it's the most stretchable crystal. That's not the full list of superlatives, but it's pretty impressive."

"Think about a handheld device that can hold every movie you want to see - along with all the others you're likely to see," says Rice University in Texas, adding that graphene-based storage "will consume virtually no power while keeping data intact" and that graphene seems happy in temperatures ranging from minus 75 to more than 200 degrees Celsius.

It's not just for memory, though. Graphene promises room-temperature superconductivity. It's one of the strongest materials ever tested, 200 times tougher than steel and more rigid than diamond. It's brilliant at conducting heat. It makes superb sensors. It could be used to make super-transistors and incredibly efficient integrated circuits. It's ideal for touchscreens, and for making OLEDs, and for making printed sheets of solar cells. It will make you a better dancer, and make you better in bed.

It won't make you a better dancer, or better in bed

We were lying about that. But they're about the only things graphene hasn't been linked with. Super-light aeroplanes that sip fuel? Graphene. Astonishingly strong building materials? Graphene. Unimaginably portable, flexible, transparent gadgets that run forever consuming next to no power? Graphene. Killing bacteria? Graphene.

This is almost all theoretical

Most of the things we're hearing about graphene are still in the "wow, wouldn't it be awesome if we could do THIS!" category - although that's changing. Firms such as Samsung and Nokia are getting into graphene in a big way, with the first commercial products based on the material due in 2013 or 2014. As Andre Geim told Nature late last year:

"Two or three months ago, I was in South Korea, and I was shown a graphene roadmap, compiled by Samsung. On this roadmap were approximately 50 dots, corresponding to particular applications. One of the closest applications with a reasonable market value was a flexible touch screen. Samsung expects something within two to three years."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Liked this? Then check out 4G mobile broadband and LTE explained

Sign up for TechRadar's free Week in Tech newsletter
Get the best tech stories of the week, plus the most popular news and reviews delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up at http://www.techradar.com/register

Follow TechRadar on Twitter * Find us on Facebook