3D arrangement of epitaxial graphene conformally grown on porousified crystalline SiC
arXiv:2112.11319 · doi:10.1016/j.carbon.2021.12.042
Abstract
Nanoporous materials represent a versatile solution for a number of applications ranging from sensing, energy applications, catalysis, drug delivery, and many others. The synergy between the outstanding properties of graphene with a three-dimensional porous structure, circumventing the limits of its 2D nature, constitutes therefore a breakthrough for many fields. We report the first three-dimensional growth of epitaxial graphene on a porousified crystalline 4H-SiC(0001). The wafer porosification is performed via a sequence of metal-assisted photochemical and photoelectrochemical etching in hydrofluoric acid based electrolytes. Pore dimensions of the matrix have been evaluated by electron tomography resulting in an average diameter of 180 nm. Graphene growth is performed in an ultra high vacuum environment at a base pressure of mbar. The graphene growth inside the pores is uniform as confirmed by Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) analysis. Raman spectroscopy confirms the high quality of the graphene with a 2D/G ratio and an average graphene crystal size of 100 nm. Furthermore, it demonstrates a uniform coverage of graphene across the whole sample area. The surface-to-volume ratio of this novel material, its properties, the tunability of the pore size and the scalability of the surface porosification process offer a game changing perspective for a large number of applications.
References in corpus (6)
- The Raman Fingerprint of Graphene
- Electrochemically Top Gated Graphene: Monitoring Dopants by Raman Scattering
- Probing the Nature of Defects in Graphene by Raman Spectroscopy
- Chemical functionalization of graphene with defects
- Raman spectroscopy of epitaxial graphene on a SiC substrate
- Highly-ordered graphene for two dimensional electronics