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CO2-promoted transfer-free growth of conformal graphene

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Abstract

Gaseous promotors have readily been adopted during the direct synthesis of graphene over insulators to enhance the growth quality and/or boost the growth rate. The understanding of the real functions of carbon-containing promotors has still remained elusive. In this study, we identify the critical roles of a representative CO2 promotor played in the direct growth of graphene. The comparative experimental trials validate CO2 as an effective modulator to decrease graphene nucleation density, improve growth kinetics, and mitigate adlayer formation. The first-principles calculations illustrate that the generation of gas-phase OH species in CO2-assisted system helps decrease the energy barriers of CH4 decomposition and carbon attachment to the growth front, which might be the key factor to allow high-quality direct growth. Such a CO2-promoted strategy enables the conformal coating of graphene film over curved insulators, where the sheet resistance of grown graphene on quartz reaches as low as 1.26 kΩ·sq−1 at an optical transmittance of ∼ 95.8%. The fabricated endoscope lens based on our conformal graphene harvests an apoptosis of 82.8% for noninvasive thermal therapy. The work presented here is expected to motivate further investigations in the controllable growth of high-quality graphene on insulating substrates.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Nos. 2019YFA0708201 and 2019YFA0708204), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. T2188101, 61527814, and 22179089), the Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences (No. BNLMS-CXTD-202001), the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Planning Project (No. Z191100000819004), the Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of Jiangsu Province (No. BK20211503), and the Suzhou Science and Technology Project-Prospective Application Research Program (No. SYG202038).

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  1. Ruojuan Liu, Zhe Peng, Xiaoli Sun, and Zhaolong Chen contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Nanochemistry, Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Ruojuan Liu, Yi Cheng, Bei Jiang & Zhongfan Liu

  2. Beijing Graphene Institute, Beijing, 100095, China

    Ruojuan Liu, Xiaoli Sun, Zhi Li, Haina Ci, Bingzhi Liu, Yi Cheng, Bei Jiang, Wanjian Yin, Jingyu Sun & Zhongfan Liu

  3. Beijing Cancer Hospital, Beijing, 100142, China

    Zhe Peng

  4. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 117575, Singapore, Singapore

    Zhaolong Chen & Junxiong Hu

  5. College of Energy, Soochow Institute for Energy and Materials Innovations, SUDA-BGI Collaborative Innovation Center, Soochow University, Suzhou, 215006, China

    Haina Ci, Bingzhi Liu, Wanjian Yin & Jingyu Sun

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  1. Ruojuan Liu
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  2. Zhe Peng
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Correspondence to Wanjian Yin, Jingyu Sun or Zhongfan Liu.

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Liu, R., Peng, Z., Sun, X. et al. CO2-promoted transfer-free growth of conformal graphene. Nano Res. 16, 6334–6342 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-022-5299-x

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