Ultrafast epitaxial growth of metre-sized single-crystal graphene on industrial Cu foil

A foundation of the modern technology that uses single-crystal silicon has been the growth of highquality single-crystal Si ingots with diameters up to 12 inches or larger. For many applications of graphene, large-area high-quality(ideally of single-crystal) material will be enabling. Since the first growth on copper foil a decade ago, inch-sized single-crystal graphene has been achieved. We present here the growth, in 20 min, of a graphene film of(5 ×50) cm^2 dimension with >99% ultra-highly oriented grains.This growth was achieved by:(1) synthesis of metre-sized single-crystal Cu(1 1 1) foil as substrate;(2)epitaxial growth of graphene islands on the Cu(1 1 1) surface;(3) seamless merging of such graphene islands into a graphene film with high single crystallinity and(4) the ultrafast growth of graphene film.These achievements were realized by a temperature-gradient-driven annealing technique to produce single-crystal Cu(1 1 1) from industrial polycrystalline Cu foil and the marvellous effects of a continuous oxygen supply from an adjacent oxide. The as-synthesized graphene film, with very few misoriented grains(if any), has a mobility up to ~23,000 cm^2 V^(-1)s^(-1)at 4 K and room temperature sheet resistance of ~230 Ω/□. It is very likely that this approach can be scaled up to achieve exceptionally large and high-quality graphene films with single crystallinity, and thus realize various industrial-level applications at a low cost.

A Graphene Industrial Cluster Takes Shape in Heilongjiang

Recently,China-Russia Expo Graphene Application Summit Forum was held in Harbin attracting more than 100 senior experts scholars,academic leaders and core business leaders from China’s graphite-based new material fields.According to the prediction o participating experts,China’s grapheme sales will reach 10 billion yuan by 2018,the globa annual production capacity of graphene will