To build devices that take advantage of graphene’s unique electrical properties, researchers need large sheets of the material. It’s typically grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on pieces of copper heated to about 1,000 °C, then transferred to another surface, such as a silicon wafer or a plastic film. Ideally, researchers would grow the material right where it’s needed, but the high temperatures necessary to grow high-quality graphene are too extreme, melting other substrates. By designing and building a specialized plasma-blowing device, researchers led by Jaeho Kim and Hiromoto Itagaki at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) have overcome this challenge. The new growth technique could make it possible to directly grow the ultrathin electronic material on plastic, silicon circuits, and other surfaces for use in high-performance or flexible electronics (Nano Lett. 2019, DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.8b03769). A process called plasma-enhanced CVD, which uses microw...