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Highly conducting graphene sheets and Langmuir–Blodgett films

Nature Nanotechnology volume 3, pages 538–542 (2008)Cite this article

Abstract

Graphene is an intriguing material with properties that are distinct from those of other graphitic systems1,2,3,4,5. The first samples of pristine graphene were obtained by ‘peeling off’2,6 and epitaxial growth5,7. Recently, the chemical reduction of graphite oxide was used to produce covalently functionalized single-layer graphene oxide8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15. However, chemical approaches for the large-scale production of highly conducting graphene sheets remain elusive. Here, we report that the exfoliation–reintercalation–expansion of graphite can produce high-quality single-layer graphene sheets stably suspended in organic solvents. The graphene sheets exhibit high electrical conductance at room and cryogenic temperatures. Large amounts of graphene sheets in organic solvents are made into large transparent conducting films by Langmuir–Blodgett assembly in a layer-by-layer manner. The chemically derived, high-quality graphene sheets could lead to future scalable graphene devices.

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Figure 1: Chemically derived single-layer GS from the solution phase.
Figure 2: Comparison of GS and GO sheets.
Figure 3: Electrical characterization of a single GS.
Figure 4: Large-scale Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) films of GS.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Graftech for providing expandable graphite samples. This work was supported in part by Intel, the Microelectronics Advanced Research Corporation Materials, Structures and Devices (MARCO MSD) Focus Centre and the Office of Naval Research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry and Laboratory for Advanced Materials, Stanford University, Stanford, 94305, California, USA

    Xiaolin Li, Guangyu Zhang, Xiaoming Sun, Xinran Wang & Hongjie Dai

  2. Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100080, China

    Xuedong Bai & Enge Wang

Authors
  1. Xiaolin Li
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  2. Guangyu Zhang
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  3. Xuedong Bai
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  4. Xiaoming Sun
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  5. Xinran Wang
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  7. Hongjie Dai
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Contributions

H.D. and X.L. conceived and designed the experiments. X.L. and G.Z. performed the experiments and analysed the data. H.D. and X.L. co-wrote the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Hongjie Dai.

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Li, X., Zhang, G., Bai, X. et al. Highly conducting graphene sheets and Langmuir–Blodgett films. Nature Nanotech 3, 538–542 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2008.210

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