Cooperative Island Growth of Large Area Single-Crystal Graphene by Chemical Vapor Deposition on Cu
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
- ORNL
- Argonne National Laboratory (ANL)
We describe a two-step approach for suppressing nucleation of graphene on Cu using chemical vapor deposition. In the first step, as received Cu foils are oxidized in air at temperatures up to 500 C to remove surface impurities and to induce the regrowth of Cu grains during subsequent annealing in H2 flow at 1040 C prior to graphene growth. In the second step, transient reactant cooling is performed by using a brief Ar pulse at the onset of growth to induce collisional deactivation of the carbon growth species. The combination of these two steps results in a three orders of magnitude reduction in the graphene nucleation density, enabling the growth of millimeter-size single crystal graphene grains. A kinetic model shows that suppressing nucleation promotes a cooperative island growth mode that favors the formation of large area single crystal graphene, and it is accompanied by a roughly 3 orders of magnitude increase in the reactive sticking probability of methane compared to that in random nucleation growth.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC05-00OR22725
- OSTI ID:
- 1157108
- Journal Information:
- ACS Nano, Vol. 8, Issue 6
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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