Our top-down approaches [1] inspired physicists to study individual layers of graphite obtained by micromechanical exfoliation, but our current approaches include growth on metal substrates and judicious use of isotopic labeling (¹³C vs ¹²C) to study the kinetics and mechanisms of deposition of large-area graphene and few layer graphene on metal substrates.[3] This talk will focus on our suggested path for obtaining large area growth of high quality graphene in ways compatible with methods of the semiconductor industry. In addition, I will present highlights of published work on polymer matrix composites with graphene as filler[4], on ultracapacitors based on graphene[5], on paper-like materials based on graphene[6], on the use of ¹³C-labeled graphite (and ¹²C-pure graphite and graphene) in a variety of areas[7], and on use of graphene as transparent but electrically conductive thin films[7]. Support of our work by SWAN-NRI, DARPA-CERA, DARPA-iMINT, and prior support by NASA, is appreciated.

(See also papers on http://bucky-central.me.utexas.edu/publications.htm )

1. Lu XK, Yu MF, Huang H, and Ruoff RS, Tailoring graphite with the goal of achieving single sheets, Nanotechnology, 10, 269-272 (1999).

3. Xuesong Li, Weiwei Cai, Jinho An, Seyoung Kim, Junghyo Nah, Dongxing Yang, Richard Piner, Aruna Velamakanni, Inhwa Jung, Emanuel Tutuc, Sanjay K. Banerjee, Luigi Colombo, Rodney S. Ruoff, Large-Area Synthesis of High-Quality and Uniform Graphene Films on Copper Foils, published online in Science on Science Express (May 7, 2009), hardcopy to appear in Science.

4. Sasha Stankovich, Dmitriy A. Dikin, Geoffrey H. B. Dommett, Kevin M. Kohlhaas, Eric J. Zimney, Eric A. Stach, Richard D. Piner, SonBinh T. Nguyen and Rodney S. Ruoff, Graphene-based composite materials, Nature 442 (2006) 282-285.

5. Meryl D. Stoller; Sungjin Park; Yanwu Zhu; Jinho An; Rodney S. Ruoff. Nano Letters (2008), 8 (10), 3498-3502.

6. Dmitriy, A. Dikin, Sasha Stankovich, Eric J. Zimney, Richard D. Piner, Geoffrey H. B. Dommett, Guennadi Evmenenko, SonBinh T. Nguyen, Rodney S. Ruoff. Nature, 448, (2007), 457-460.

7. Cai, Weiwei; Piner, Richard D.; Stadermann, Frank J.; Park, Sungjin; Shaibat, Medhat A.; Ishii, Yoshitaka; Yang, Dongxing; Velamakanni, Aruna; An, Sung Jin; Stoller, Meryl; An, Jinho; Chen, Dongmin; Ruoff, Rodney S., Science (2008), 321(5897), 1815-1817.

8. Supinda Watcharotone, Dimitry A. Dikin, Sasha Stankovich, Richard Piner, Inhwa Jung, Geoffrey H. B. Dommett, Guennadi Evmenenko, Shang-En Wu, Shu-Fang Chen, Chuan-Pu Liu, SonBinh T. Nguyen, Rodney S. Ruoff. Nano Letters, 7(7), (2007), 1888-1892.

Recent study on graphene synthesis on metal thin film by chemical vapor deposition in a hydrocarbon ambient has shown promising results for the feasibility of formation of graphene layer over a large area.^1-4 However the graphene layer grown on metal thin film shows various kinds of defects on its surface such as islands of thick graphene layers, carbon dumps, and wrinkles from the different thermal expansion coefficient between metal and carbon, and so on.^2-3 Control of such defects is critical for the technique to be useful, but the mechanism of the defect formation has not been well studied so far. In this work, the effect of various process conditions which affect the quality of graphene on nickel thin film is carefully investigated, including nickel thin film deposition process, ramping up ambient, annealing ambient, annealing temperature, thickness of nickel thin film, etc. During the high temperature annealing process, nickel thin film becomes highly agglomerated and thereby the surface becomes quite rough. Since the segregated carbon amount at nickel grain boundary is different from that segregated from crystalline nickel inside the grain, the agglomeration of nickel directly affects the thickness uniformity of graphene and roughness of graphene surface. It is found that the deposition process of nickel thin film affects the agglomeration and the e-beam evaporation of nickel has shown less agglomeration upon annealing, compared to physical sputtering. It is also found that the annealing temperature in CH₄ is a critical factor to control the amount of thick graphite island on graphene. Furthermore, it is found that the gas ambient during ramping up affects the deformation of nickel thin film. All such detailed process conditions on graphene formation on nickel thin film are carefully investigated and will be presented.

¹Q. Yu et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 93, 113103 (2008).

²A. Reina et al., Nano Lett. 9, 31 (2009)

³K. S. Kim et al., Nature 457, 706 (2009)

⁴L. G. D. Arco et al., IEEE Trans. Nanotech. 8, 135 (2009)

Graphene and graphene oxide have attracted widespread interest because of their unique structural and electronic properties, which lend themselves well to the production of nanoscale electronic and sensing devices. Indeed, graphene is a single monolayer thick carbon sheet with remarkably high electron mobility. The addition of oxygen increases the sheet thickness and decreases this mobility and, more interestingly, determines both the conducting and reactive properties of the material. One significant impediment to realizing the potential of graphene oxide is the development of an industrially viable approach to producing large area substrates of well-controlled oxygen concentration. In this respect, plasmas are an ideal candidate but problems associated with the large fluxes of energetic ions are a significant concern. The Naval Research Laboratory has developed a plasma processing system that is characterized by a uniquely low incident ion energy, in the range of a few eV, at or near the carbon-carbon and carbon-oxygen bond strength. We discuss the use of this system to reduce the oxygen concentration of graphene oxide. We examine the plasma processing conditions, plasma characteristics, and the resulting properties of the material in an effort to understand reduction mechanisms. This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research.

Epitaxy on transition metal substrates is a promising approach for the large-scale synthesis of graphene for potential applications in microelectronics and sensing. In particular, the controlled layer-by-layer growth of graphene on Ru(0001) has been shown to result in macroscopic monocrystalline graphene domains with lateral sizes greater than 200 microns, perfect thickness uniformity, and very low defect density [1]. Whereas the first graphene layer interacts strongly with the Ru(0001) template, the second layer is essentially decoupled from the metallic support, thus preserving the atomic structure and exotic electronic properties of isolated single-layer graphene [2]. A viable route towards large-area, free-standing graphene would be to grow on polycrystalline transition-metal thin films rather than single crystals, followed by the dissolution of the metal template to detach the graphene and transfer it to another support. Two groups have recently demonstrated the growth of few-layer graphene on polycrystalline Ni films using this method [3, 4].

Here, we report a study of graphene growth on Ru thin films. The polycrystalline Ru template layers were deposited on SiO₂ by magnetron sputtering in ultrahigh vacuum. We used in-situ annealing and scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) to study the recrystallization and grain growth of the Ru template, crucial to forming a starting surface suitable for the growth of macroscopic graphene domains. STM also provided a detailed understanding of the interaction of the growing graphene layer with Ru grains with different surface orientations, grain boundaries, as well as highly vicinal surfaces. Cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy (TEM) was used to directly image the graphene-metal interface for the first time. Our results provide a basis for the scalable synthesis of graphene on transition metal thin films.

[1] P. W. Sutter, J.-I. Flege, and E. A. Sutter, Nature Mater. 7, 406 (2008).

[2] E. Sutter, D. P. Acharya, J. T. Sadowski, and P. Sutter, Appl. Phys. Lett. 94, 133101 (2009).

[3] A. Reina et al., Nano Lett. 9, 30 (2009).

[4] K. S. Kim et al., Nature 457, 706 (2009).

A route for the fabrication of 1 nm thin and free-standing carbon films and membranes, whose electrical and mechanical behavior as well as surface functionalization can be tuned, is presented. Self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of aromatic biphenyls are cross-linked by electron irradiation and then detached from the surface. This results in mechanically stable carbon nanosheets with the thickness of a single molecule and sizes up to several cm². Upon annealing at ~1000K, the cross-linked monolayers transform into a graphitic phase that consists of nanosize patches of graphene [1]. This transition is accompanied by a drop of the sheet resistivity from ~10⁸ to ~10² kΩ/sq and mechanical stiffening from ~10 to 50 GPa. Hence, nanosheets represent two-dimensional materials with tunable conductivity and stiffness. When transferred onto SiO₂/Si substrates, nanosheets can be visualized by Raleigh interference contrast. By using SAMs of appropriate biphenyls, a chemical surface functionalization of the nanosheets can be achieved, which allows their tailoring for technical applications. Nanosheet devices are presented and applications in microscopy as well as in polymer- and biophysics are discussed.

[1] A. Turchanin, A. Beyer, Ch. T. Nottbohm, X. Zhang, R. Stosch, A. Sologubenko, J. Mayer, P. Hinze, T. Weimann, A. Gölzhäuser, Adv. Mater. 21, 1233 (2009)