A number of foreign scientists are claiming that a Korean-American scientist should have shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics.

According the international journal Nature, physicist Walter de Heer of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta says the awarding of the 2010 prize to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester in the U.K. may have been faulty.

Geim and Novoselov received the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their “groundbreaking” experiments on one-atom-thick planar sheets of carbon atoms called graphene.

De Heer said in a letter to the Nobel Committee that with a widely cited 2004 paper, Geim and Novoselov were regarded as the first to have synthesized the material. He said, however, that the committee’s errors misrepresent contributions made by other researchers.

The Georgia Tech professor sent a letter to the committee on November 17th listing his objections to the selection of this year’s winners.

He criticized the Nobel Committee for having downplayed the work of Philip Kim of Columbia University in New York in selecting this year’s winners.
De Heer said that when Geim and Novoselov published crucial electronic measurements on graphene in Nature in 2005, the paper appeared back-to-back with one from Kim's group.

He claimed that Kim should have shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Nobel Committee said that although it agrees with some of de Heer’s objections, it has no plans to reverse its decision or reselect winners.