Production, properties and potential of graphene

TL;DR

This review comprehensively covers graphene's electronic structure, production methods, properties, and potential applications, highlighting its versatility for future electronic and sensing technologies.

Contribution

It provides an extensive summary of production techniques, properties, and applications of graphene, emphasizing its potential as a post-silicon material and platform for molecular electronics.

Findings

High carrier mobility in suspended and annealed samples

Thickness-dependent optical transparency

Robustness and integration in sensing devices

Abstract

This review on graphene, a one atom thick, two-dimensional sheet of carbon atoms, starts with a general description of the graphene electronic structure as well as a basic experimental toolkit for identifying and handling this material. Owing to the versatility of graphene properties and projected applications, several production techniques are summarized, ranging from the mechanical exfoliation of high quality graphene to the direct growth on carbides or metal substrates and from the chemical routes using graphene oxide to the newly developed approach at the molecular level. The most promising and appealing properties of graphene are summarized from an exponentially growing literature, with a particular attention to matching production methods to characteristics and to applications. In particular, we report on the high carrier mobility value in suspended and annealed samples for electronic devices, on the thickness-dependent optical transparency and, in the mechanical section, on the high robustness and full integration of graphene in sensing device applications. Finally, we emphasize on the high potential of graphene not only as a post-silicon materials for CMOS device application but more ambitiously as a platform for post-CMOS molecular architecture in electronic information processing.