温和氢气等离子体对石墨烯的各向异性刻蚀

Anisotropic Etching of Graphene by Soft Hydrogen Plasma

本文采用一种简单有效的方法对石墨烯进行处理,可将多层石墨烯减薄为单层或任意层。采用自主研发的温和等离子体系统,以氢气作为先驱气体对多层石墨烯进行处理,再对处理过的样品进行高温退火。研究表明,温和氢气等离子体能利用氢离子的轰击效应对顶层石墨烯进行刻蚀,刻蚀过程具有良好的各向异性,刻蚀后氮气环境下的高温退火能够有效修复刻蚀过程中产生的晶格缺陷,从而得到品质较好的单层与少层石墨烯。本研究为制备品质良好的单层及少层石墨烯提供了一种新的方法。

Graphene is a typical two-dimensional carbon nanomaterial.Its special single atomic layer structure makes it possess outstanding electronic,optical and physical properties,and a great application prospect in many fields.These unique optoelectronic properties depend strongly on the number of layer of the graphene We proposed hereafter a simple and efficient method to deal with the graphene,in which multilayer graphene can be thinned to any desired number and even monolayer.Multilayer graphene samples were treated by our self-developed soft plasma system using hydrogen as the precursor gas,and then annealled at a high temperature.We proved that our soft hydrogen plasma can etch away top graphene layers by ion bombardment effect with a good anisotropy.Also high-temperature post-annealing in nitrogen atmosphere could effectively repair the lattice defects induced by plasma irradiation,and therefore monolayer and few-layer graphene samples with high quality were obtained.Our study may provide a new method for preparing monolayer and few-layer graphene samples with high quality.