Growth of graphene from solid carbon sources

The past few years have seen spectacular growth of interest in graphene, the carbon monolayer with novel electronic properties. Efforts to produce large sheets of monolayer (or few-layer) graphene could receive a welcome boost from a simple new procedure. Just by baking various solid carbon sources deposited on a metal catalyst substrate at a relatively modest 800 °C, it is possible to produce either pristine graphene or doped graphene in a single step. Suitable starting materials include polymer films and various small molecules. The past few years have seen a spectacular growth of interest in graphene. Efforts to produce large sheets of monolayer (or few-layer) graphene could receive a welcome boost from the simple procedure reported by these authors. They show how baking various solid carbon sources (for example polymer films) deposited on a metal catalyst substrate can produce either pristine graphene or doped graphene in a single step. Monolayer graphene was first obtained1 as a transferable material in 2004 and has stimulated intense activity among physicists, chemists and material scientists1,2,3,4. Much research has been focused on developing routes for obtaining large sheets of monolayer or bilayer graphene. This has been recently achieved by chemical vapour deposition (CVD) of CH4 or C2H2 gases on copper or nickel substrates5,6,7. But CVD is limited to the use of gaseous raw materials, making it difficult to apply the technology to a wider variety of potential feedstocks. Here we demonstrate that large area, high-quality graphene with controllable thickness can be grown from different solid carbon sources—such as polymer films or small molecules—deposited on a metal catalyst substrate at temperatures as low as 800 °C. Both pristine graphene and doped graphene were grown with this one-step process using the same experimental set-up.