Graphene made easy: high quality, large-area samples

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple, cost-effective method for producing large-area, high-quality graphene on insulating substrates, enabling both fundamental research and practical applications.

Contribution

The authors present an original technique to bond bulk graphite onto insulating substrates and cleave it to obtain large-area, few-layer graphene samples.

Findings

Prepared millimeter-sized few-layer graphene samples.

Measured I-V characteristics in a field-effect transistor.

Demonstrated the method's potential for large-scale graphene production.

Abstract

We show that by using an original method, bulk graphite can be bonded onto borosilicate glass or potentially any insulating substrate with ionic conductivity and then cleaved off to leave single or few layer graphene on the substrate, identified optically and with Raman spectroscopy. This simple, inexpensive and fast method leads to the preparation of large area graphene and single or few-layer films of layered materials in general. We have prepared mm size few-layer graphene samples and also measured I-V characteristics in a FET. This opens up perspectives both for fundamental research as well as for applications.