A pair of Russian-born physicists working at the University of Manchester in England have won the Nobel Prize in Physics for investigating the remarkable properties of ultrathin carbon flakes known as graphene, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Tuesday.

The physicists are Andre Geim, 51, and Konstantin Novoselov, 36. They will split the prize of about $1.4 million.

Graphene is a form of carbon in which the atoms are arranged in a flat hexagon lattice like microscopic chicken wire, a single atom thick. It is not only the thinnest material in the world but also one of the strongest and hardest.

Among its other properties, graphene is able to conduct electricity as well as copper does and to conduct heat better than any other known material, and it is practically transparent. Physicists say that it could eventually rival silicon as a basis for computer chips, serve as a sensitive pollution-monitoring material, improve flat-screen televisions and enable the creation of new materials and novel tests of quantum weirdness.

In a statement, the Royal Academy said, “Carbon, the basis of all known life on Earth, has surprised us once again.”

Graphene is closely related to two other forms of carbon that have generated intense interest in recent years: buckyballs, which are soccer-ball arrangements of carbon atoms, and nanotubes, which are rolled-up sheets of carbon atoms. It was long thought, however, that an essentially two-dimensional sheet of carbon atoms would be unstable and would warp or fold up. Geim and Novoselov first succeeded in creating flakes of graphene by peeling them off piles of graphite — the material that is in a pencil lead — using Scotch tape.

Geim, who was born in Sochi, Russia, and is now a Dutch citizen, studied at the Moscow Physical-Technical Institute and was awarded a Ph.D. at the Institute of Solid State Physics in Chernogolovka in 1987. He led a wandering research life — “For me it’s very boring to work on the same thing year after year,” he explained in an interview posted on the Nobel Prize website — before he became a professor at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands.

It was at Nijmegen that he connected with Novoselov, who was born in Nizhny Tagil and became Geim’s graduate student in the Netherlands. When Geim moved to Manchester, he took Novoselov with him; Novoselov is now a British and Russian citizen.

The graphene creation originated in what Geim and Novoselov call “Friday evening” experiments, crazy things that might or might not work out.

In one of them, Geim managed to levitate a frog in a magnetic field, for which he won an Ig Nobel — a parody award for “improbable research” — in 2000. On another occasion they produced a “gecko tape” that mimicked the way geckos and Spider-Man can walk on the ceiling.

The work on graphene arose from the pair’s desire to investigate the electrical properties of graphite.

The first two papers on graphene were published in Science and online in 2004. Three more appeared in 2005. Since then, the Swedish Academy said, “research in this area has literally exploded,” producing a growing number of papers about graphene, its amazing properties and its promise.

If scaled up to the thickness of plastic refrigerator wrap, a sheet of graphene stretched over a coffee cup could support the weight of a truck bearing down on a pencil point, according to tests conducted by two Columbia University researchers, Jeffrey Kysar and James Hone.