The pivotal role of plasmachemistry in determining a sustainable future for graphene innovations

Abstract

Today more than yesterday, the development of innovative technologies is strongly governed by the availability of “new” materials. Among these, graphene is becoming more and more popular due to its broad applicability from electronics, photonics, photovoltaics and sensoristics to biomedical devices and to a variety of structural applications. In general, the success of graphene is due to three inseparable physical properties that can be considered “graphene values”: transparency, conductivity and flexibility. Indeed most of the applications that take advantage of these peculiar properties are yet to be revealed. Although there are many applications demonstrated at lab scale, the development of graphene technologies is slower than the graphene community expected. The reasons are many and varied, but the tailoring of the transport properties and even more the lack of the band gap (graphene is a zero band gap semimetal) play a crucial role in determining a sustainable future for graphene innovations. In this work, we will present plasma chemistry strategies for overcoming the main issues described above still limiting the technological application of graphene. Experimental results on the tuning of CVD graphene properties as well as on the introduction of new ones by plasma treatment will be reported. The potential of plasma-chemistry applied to CVD graphene for the healing of graphene defects, the tuning of transport properties, the introduction of a transport gap as well as of photoactive behavior in CVD graphene will be demonstrated.