Fluorine boosts graphene growth

Abstract

To mass-produce technologies that exploit graphene’s exciting electronic and optical properties, manufacturers will need to make large, high-quality films quickly. It turns out that fluorine can help. The gas accelerates graphene growth to more than 1,000 times as fast as without it, researchers report (Nat. Chem. 2019, DOI: 10.1038/s41557-019-0290-1). “The recorded growth rate of 1.2 mm/min could, in principle, allow us to grow a very large graphene wafer in less than 10 min,” says Feng Ding of the Institute for Basic Science in Ulsan, South Korea. Fluorine can also significantly speed the growth of two other promising 2-D electronic materials, tungsten disulfide and hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN). Researchers usually make graphene with chemical vapor deposition (CVD), which involves injecting methane vapors into a heated vacuum chamber, where the gas decomposes and deposits as graphene on copper foil. Recently, researchers have found that adding oxygen or hydrogen into the reactor helps