Chemical Vapor Deposition Growth of Graphene using Other Hydrocarbon Sources

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-temperature chemical vapor deposition method for growing high-quality graphene using solid and liquid hydrocarbon sources, significantly reducing the typical growth temperature from 1000°C to as low as 300°C.

Contribution

It introduces a novel CVD process utilizing solid and liquid hydrocarbons for graphene growth at substantially lower temperatures than traditional methods.

Findings

Graphene can be grown at 400°C using solid PMMA and polystyrene.

Benzene enables monolayer graphene growth at 300°C.

First principles calculations support the low-temperature growth mechanism.

Abstract

Graphene has attracted a lot of research interests due to its exotic properties and a wide spectrum of potential applications. Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) from gaseous hydrocarbon sources has shown great promises for large-scale graphene growth. However, high growth temperature, typically 1000{\deg}C, is required for such growth. Here we demonstrate a revised CVD route to grow graphene on Cu foils at low temperature, adopting solid and liquid hydrocarbon feedstocks. For solid PMMA and polystyrene precursors, centimeter-scale monolayer graphene films are synthesized at a growth temperature down to 400{\deg}C. When benzene is used as the hydrocarbon source, monolayer graphene flakes with excellent quality are achieved at a growth temperature as low as 300{\deg}C. The successful low-temperature growth can be qualitatively understood from the first principles calculations. Our work might pave a way to undemanding route for economical and convenient graphene growth.