Texas researchers used surface oxygen to grow centimeter-size single graphene crystals on copper. The crystals were about 10,000 times as large as the largest crystals from only four years ago. Very large single crystals have exceptional electrical properties.
One of the world’s strongest materials, graphene is flexible and has high electrical and thermal conductivity that makes it a promising material for flexible electronics, solar cells, batteries and high-speed transistors. The team’s understanding of how graphene growth is influenced by differing amounts of surface oxygen is a major step toward improved high-quality graphene films at industrial scale.
The team’s method “is a fundamental breakthrough, which will lead to growth of high-quality and large area graphene film,” said Sanjay Banerjee, who heads the Cockrell School’s South West Academy of Nanoelectronics (SWAN). “By increasing the single-crystal domain sizes, the electronic transport properties will be dramatically improved and lead to new applications in flexible electronics.”
Graphene has always been grown in a polycrystalline form, that is, it is composed of many crystals that are joined together with irregular chemical bonding at the boundaries between crystals (“grain boundaries”), something like a patch-work quilt. Large single-crystal graphene is of great interest because the grain boundaries in polycrystalline material have defects, and eliminating such defects makes for a better material.
“In the long run it might be possible to achieve meter-length single crystals,” Ruoff said. “This has been possible with other materials, such as silicon and quartz. Even a centimeter crystal size — if the grain boundaries are not too defective — is extremely significant."
“We can start to think of this material’s potential use in airplanes and in other structural applications — if it proves to be exceptionally strong at length scales like parts of an airplane wing, and so on,” he said.
![]()
Read more »![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
One of the world’s strongest materials, graphene is flexible and has high electrical and thermal conductivity that makes it a promising material for flexible electronics, solar cells, batteries and high-speed transistors. The team’s understanding of how graphene growth is influenced by differing amounts of surface oxygen is a major step toward improved high-quality graphene films at industrial scale.
The team’s method “is a fundamental breakthrough, which will lead to growth of high-quality and large area graphene film,” said Sanjay Banerjee, who heads the Cockrell School’s South West Academy of Nanoelectronics (SWAN). “By increasing the single-crystal domain sizes, the electronic transport properties will be dramatically improved and lead to new applications in flexible electronics.”
Graphene has always been grown in a polycrystalline form, that is, it is composed of many crystals that are joined together with irregular chemical bonding at the boundaries between crystals (“grain boundaries”), something like a patch-work quilt. Large single-crystal graphene is of great interest because the grain boundaries in polycrystalline material have defects, and eliminating such defects makes for a better material.
“In the long run it might be possible to achieve meter-length single crystals,” Ruoff said. “This has been possible with other materials, such as silicon and quartz. Even a centimeter crystal size — if the grain boundaries are not too defective — is extremely significant."
“We can start to think of this material’s potential use in airplanes and in other structural applications — if it proves to be exceptionally strong at length scales like parts of an airplane wing, and so on,” he said.
Read more »
