The growth of weakly coupled graphene sheets from silicon carbide powder

A simple method for production of weakly coupled graphene layers by hightemperature sublimation of polycrystalline SiC is presented. The method allows manufacturing carbon-based composite with a high content of weakly coupled graphene layers in large-scale production. The study of the obtained carbon-based material by means of scanning electron microscopy, Raman spectroscopy and atomic force microscopy detected graphene plates with lateral size of up to tens of micrometers. The obtained graphene sheets are shown to have very high crystal perfection, low concentration of defects and weak interlayer coupling, which depends on the growth conditions. The proposed method of producing graphene-based composites is supposed to be very promising due to its relative simplicity and high output

Graphene layers fabricated from the Ni/a-SiC bilayer precursor

This paper considers a synthesis of graphene flakes on the Ni surface by vacuum long and nitrogen rapid thermal treatment of the “sandwich” amorphous (a) SiC/Ni multilayer deposited on silicon wafer by magnetron sputtering technique. The lateral size of graphene flakes was estimated to be about hundreds of micrometers while the thickness estimated using Raman scattering varied from one to few layers in case of vacuum annealing. Rapid thermal annealing (RTA) in nitrogen ambient results in formation of multilayer graphene with surface covering up to 80%. The graphene layers synthesized on Ni during CVD process was used as reference samples. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is not able to detect graphene flakes in regime of surface topology examination because of large roughness of Ni surface. Employment of scanning Kelvin probe force microscopy (SKPFM) demonstrates correlation of the surface potential and graphene flakes visible in optical microscopy. Using the KPFM method, potential differences between Ni and graphene were determined