The Hone lab at Columbia Engineering created over 100 identical graphene samples with their oxygen-free chemical vapor deposition method. Credit: Jacob Amontree & Christian Cupo, Columbia UniversityGraphene has been called “the wonder material of the 21st century.” Since its discovery in 2004, the material—a single layer of carbon atoms—has been touted for its host of unique properties, which include ultra-high electrical conductivity and remarkable tensile strength.
To move from lab explorations to real-world applications, researchers developed a method to synthesize large-area graphene about 15 years ago. This process, known as CVD growth, passes a carbon-containing gas, such as methane, over a copper surface at a temperature high enough that the methane breaks apart and the carbon atoms rearrange to form a single honeycomb-shaped layer of graphene.CVD growth can be scaled up to create graphene samples that are centimeters or even meters in size.
Jacob Amontree and Xingzhou Yan displaying their pristine CVD graphene synthesized on ultra-flat copper/sapphire wafers. Credit: Zhiying Wang, Columbia UniversityThe quality of the OF-CVD-grown samples proved virtually identical to that of exfoliated graphene.
“We both became fascinated by graphene and its potential as undergraduates,” Amontree and Yan said. “We conducted countless experiments and synthesized thousands of samples over the past four years of our PhDs. Seeing this study finally come to fruition is a dream come true.”
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