Researchers succeed in creating single-crystal, large-area, fold-free monolayer graphene

A team of researchers, led by Director Rod Ruoff at the Center for Multidimensional Carbon Materials (CMCM) within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) and including graduate students at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), has achieved growth and characterization of large area, single-crystal graphene totally free from wrinkles, folds, or adlayers. It was said to be ‘the most perfect graphene that has been grown and characterized, to date’.

Director Ruoff notes: “This pioneering breakthrough was due to many contributing factors, including human ingenuity and the ability of the CMCM researchers to reproducibly make large-area single-crystal Cu-Ni(111) foils, on which the graphene was grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) using a mixture of ethylene with hydrogen in a stream of argon gas.” Student Meihui Wang, Dr. Ming Huang, and Dr. Da Luo along with Ruoff undertook a series of experiments of growing single-crystal and single-layer graphene on such ‘home-made’ Cu-Ni(111) foils under different temperatures.