Designed Three-Dimensional Freestanding Single-Crystal Carbon Architectures

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel method to fabricate 3D freestanding single-crystal carbon architectures from silicon carbide templates, enabling scalable, mechanically stable structures with potential for advanced 3D carbon devices.

Contribution

A new single-step thermal process to create scalable, 3D freestanding single-crystal carbon structures from SiC templates is introduced.

Findings

Structures are mechanically stable after repeated loading.

Size can be controlled from nanoscale to microscale.

Electrical conductance relates to mechanical deformation.

Abstract

Single-crystal carbon nanomaterials have led to great advances in nanotechnology. The first single-crystal carbon nanomaterial, fullerene, was fabricated in a zero-dimensional form. One-dimensional carbon nanotubes and two-dimensional graphene have since followed and continue to provide further impetus to this field. In this study, we fabricated designed three-dimensional (3D) single-crystal carbon architectures by using silicon carbide templates. For this method, a designed 3D SiC structure was transformed into a 3D freestanding single-crystal carbon structure that retained the original SiC structure by performing a simple single-step thermal process. The SiC structure inside the 3D carbon structure is self-etched, which results in a 3D freestanding carbon structure. The 3D carbon structure is a single crystal with the same hexagonal close-packed structure as graphene. The size of the carbon structures can be controlled from the nanoscale to the microscale, and arrays of these structures can be scaled up to the wafer scale. The 3D freestanding carbon structures were found to be mechanically stable even after repeated loading. The relationship between the reversible mechanical deformation of a carbon structure and its electrical conductance was also investigated. Our method of fabricating designed 3D freestanding single-crystal graphene architectures opens up prospects in the field of single-crystal carbon nanomaterials, and paves the way for the development of 3D single-crystal carbon devices.