Highly Conducting Graphene Sheets and Langmuir-Blodgett Films

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable method to produce high-quality, highly conductive graphene sheets via exfoliation-reintercalation-expansion, and demonstrates their application in transparent conducting films using Langmuir-Blodgett assembly.

Contribution

It introduces a novel exfoliation-reintercalation-expansion technique for large-scale production of high-quality graphene sheets with high electrical conductance.

Findings

Graphene sheets exhibit high electrical conductance at room and cryogenic temperatures.

Large quantities of graphene can be assembled into transparent conducting films.

The method is potentially scalable for future graphene device manufacturing.

Abstract

Graphene is an intriguing material with properties that are distinct from those of other graphitic systems. The first samples of pristine graphene were obtained by peeling off and epitaxial growth. Recently, the chemical reduction of graphite oxide was used to produce covalently functionalized single-layer graphene oxide. However, chemical approaches for the large-scale production of highly conducting graphene sheets remain elusive. Here, we report that the exfoliation-reintercalation-expansion of graphite can produce high-quality single-layer graphene sheets stably suspended in organic solvents. The graphene sheets exhibit high electrical conductance at room and cryogenic temperatures. Large amounts of graphene sheets in organic solvents are made into large transparent conducting films by Langmuir-Blodgett assembly in a layer-by-layer manner. The chemically derived high quality graphene sheets could lead to future scalable graphene devices.