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Towards intrinsically pure graphene grown on copper

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Abstract

The state-of-the-art semiconductor industry is built on the successful production of silicon ingot with extreme purity as high as 99.999999999%, or the so-called “eleven nines”. The coming high-end applications of graphene in electronics and optoelectronics will inevitably need defect-free pure graphene as well. Due to its two-dimensional (2D) characteristics, graphene restricts all the defects on its surface and has the opportunity to eliminate all kinds of defects, i.e., line defects at grain boundaries and point or dot defects in grains, and produce intrinsically pure graphene. In the past decade, epitaxy growth has been adopted to grow graphene by seamlessly stitching of aligned grains and the line defects at grain boundaries were eliminated finally. However, as for the equally common dot and point defects in graphene grain, there are rare ways to detect or reduce them with high throughput and efficiency. Here, we report a methodology to realize the production of ultrapure graphene grown on copper by eliminating both the dot and point defects in graphene grains. The dot defects, proved to be caused by the silica particles shedding from quartz tube during the high-temperature growth, were excluded by a designed heat-resisting box to prevent the deposition of particles on the copper surface. The point defects were optically visualized by a mild-oxidation-assisted method and further reduced by etching-regrowth process to an ultralow level of less than 1/1,000 µm2. Our work points out an avenue for the production of intrinsically pure graphene and thus lays the foundation for the large-scale graphene applications at the integrated-circuit level.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by The Key R&D Program of Guangdong Province (Nos. 2019B010931001, 2020B010189001, and 2018B030327001), Guangdong Provincial Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (No. 2020B1515020043), Science and Technology Program of Guangzhou (No. 2019050001), Beijing Natural Science Foundation (No. JQ19004), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 52025023, 51991340, and 51991342), National Key R&D Program of China (Nos. 2016YFA0300903 and 2016YFA0300804), Beijing Excellent Talents Training Support (No. 2017000026833ZK11), Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission (No. Z191100007219005), Beijing Graphene Innovation Program (No. Z181100004818003), The Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. XDB33000000), Bureau of Industry and Information Technology of Shenzhen (Graphene platform No. 201901161512), Guangdong Innovative and Entrepreneurial Research Team Program (No. 2016ZT06D348), the Science, Technology, Innovation Commission of Shenzhen Municipality (No. KYTDPT20181011104202253), The Pearl River Talent Recruitment Program of Guangdong Province (No. 2019ZT08C321), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Nos. 2019M660280, 2019M660281, and 2020T130022)

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  1. Xiaozhi Xu and Ruixi Qiao contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Quantum Engineering and Quantum Materials, School of Physics and Telecommunication Engineering, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510006, China

    Xiaozhi Xu, Zhihua Liang, Ran Wang, Fankai Zeng, Guoliang Cui, Xiaowen Zhang, Xu Zhou, Enke Wang & Zhilie Tang

  2. Guangdong-Hong Kong Joint Laboratory of Quantum Matter, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510006, China

    Xiaozhi Xu, Zhihua Liang, Ran Wang, Fankai Zeng, Guoliang Cui, Xiaowen Zhang, Xu Zhou, Enke Wang & Zhilie Tang

  3. State Key Laboratory for Mesoscopic Physics, Frontiers Science Center for Nano-optoelectronics, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Ruixi Qiao, Zhihong Zhang, Yi Guo, Can Liu & Kaihui Liu

  4. International Centre for Quantum Materials, Collaborative Innovation Centre of Quantum Matter, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Ruixi Qiao, Zhihong Zhang, Muhong Wu & Kaihui Liu

  5. Shenzhen Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering, and Department of Physics, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, 518055, China

    Dingxin Zou, Yue Zhao & Dapeng Yu

  6. Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangdong, 523808, China

    Ying Fu

  7. School of Physical Science and Technology, Shanghai Tech University, Shanghai, 200031, China

    Zhujun Wang

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  1. Xiaozhi Xu
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Correspondence to Xiaozhi Xu or Kaihui Liu.

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Xu, X., Qiao, R., Liang, Z. et al. Towards intrinsically pure graphene grown on copper. Nano Res. 15, 919–924 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-021-3575-9

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