Large Area, Few-layer Graphene Films for Various Applications
Jing Kong, Assistant Professor, Department of EECS
Graphene is the hexagonal arrangement of carbon atoms forming a one-atom thick planar sheet. This layer is the building block of graphite and carbon nanotubes and it has been studied widely-by-theorists since the middle of the last century. Graphene sheets show great potential as another materials option for electronics applications. The overall goal of this seed project is to engineer the underlying metal substrate to achieve regular grain boundaries and facilitate graphene films with controlled morphology.
This seed work is divided into three parts:
1) Substrate engineering to achieve single crystal grains with regular grain boundaries
2) Investigation of the CVD growth with other types of metal substrates
3) Combining Parts 1 and 2 and identifying the optimized substrate for graphene morphology engineering
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Figure: (A) Optical image of graphene grown on Ni. The darker regions are thicker graphene regions, the arrows point to the 1-2 layer regions, which correspond to the regions pointed out by the arrows in (B). (B) The same graphene layer in (A) transferred onto SiO2/Si substrate. (C) An enlarged image of as-grown graphene on Ni showing thicker graphenes are grown over the grain boundary regions. (D) Another graphene film transferred to a SiO2/ Si substrate with a different morphology. Different film morphologies can be obtained by tunning CVD parameters such as cooling rate. (E) A schematic representation of the increase in atomic steps at the grain boundary region. |
