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Nano Research 2023, 16(5): 6334-6342 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-022-5299-x
Research Article | Issue | Published: 21 December 2022

CO2-promoted transfer-free growth of conformal graphene

Show Author's Information Ruojuan Liu1,2,§,  Zhe Peng3,§,  Xiaoli Sun2,§,  Zhaolong Chen4,§,  Zhi Li2,  Haina Ci2,5,  Bingzhi Liu2,5,  Yi Cheng1,2,  Bei Jiang1,2,  Junxiong Hu4,  Wanjian Yin2,5( ),  Jingyu Sun2,5( ),  Zhongfan Liu1,2( )
Center for Nanochemistry, Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Beijing Graphene Institute, Beijing 100095, China
Beijing Cancer Hospital, Beijing 100142, China
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 117575, Singapore
College of Energy, Soochow Institute for Energy and Materials Innovations, SUDA-BGI Collaborative Innovation Center, Soochow University, Suzhou 215006, China

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

Keywords:
graphene, chemical vapor deposition, carbon dioxide, transfer-free growth, promotor, conformal
Topics:
Chemical vapor depositionGraphene
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Liu R, Peng Z, Sun X, et al. CO2-promoted transfer-free growth of conformal graphene. Nano Research, 2023, 16(5): 6334-6342. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-022-5299-x
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Abstract Full text Electronic supplementary material About this article

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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Abstract
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Electronic supplementary material
About this article

CO2-promoted transfer-free growth of conformal graphene

Show Author's information Ruojuan Liu1,2,§, Zhe Peng3,§, Xiaoli Sun2,§, Zhaolong Chen4,§, Zhi Li2, Haina Ci2,5, Bingzhi Liu2,5, Yi Cheng1,2, Bei Jiang1,2, Junxiong Hu4, Wanjian Yin2,5( ), Jingyu Sun2,5( ), Zhongfan Liu1,2( )
Center for Nanochemistry, Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Beijing Graphene Institute, Beijing 100095, China
Beijing Cancer Hospital, Beijing 100142, China
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 117575, Singapore
College of Energy, Soochow Institute for Energy and Materials Innovations, SUDA-BGI Collaborative Innovation Center, Soochow University, Suzhou 215006, China

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

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.

Keywords: graphene, chemical vapor deposition, carbon dioxide, transfer-free growth, promotor, conformal

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Publication history
Copyright
Acknowledgements

Publication history

Received: 11 October 2022
Revised: 30 October 2022
Accepted: 03 November 2022
Published: 21 December 2022
Issue date: May 2023

Copyright

© Tsinghua University Press 2022

Acknowledgements

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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