Researchers at the United States Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have discovered a new approach to growing graphene that greatly reduces problems that have plagued scientists in the past. The team’s findings demonstrate that hydrogen, rather than carbon, dictates the graphene grain shape and size. According to Ivan Vlassiouk, the team leader and a professor of chemistry at New Mexico State University, “Hydrogen not only initiates the graphene growth, but controls the graphene shape and size. In our paper, we have described a method to grow well-defined graphene grains that have perfect hexagonal shapes pointing to the faultless single crystal structure.” The discovery clears a path to graphene’s use in sophisticated electronic devices of tomorrow. The new recipe for graphene allows the team to reliably synthesize the material on a large scale, controlling grain size and boundaries, which may result in improved functionality of the material in transistors, semiconductors and potentially hundreds of electronic devices. Vlassiouk adds, “Our findings are crucial for developing a method for growing ultra-large-scale single domain graphene that will constitute a major breakthrough toward graphene implementation in real-world devices.” The team’s paper was published in the journal ACS Nano.
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