Maciej Jankowskib (ESRF−The European Synchrotron, Grenoble, France)

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Inma Hernández

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NOTE: If you are interested in attending, please contact Inma Hernández with your Identity Card number and name to obtain the ALBA access.
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https://indico.cells.es/event/1171/

Abstract

Two-dimensional materials (2DMs) are at the center of attention due to their unique electronic, mechanical, thermal, and optical properties [1]. The chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth of 2DMs on liquid metals is an emerging and promising route toward the controlled fabrication of 2DMs of high quality, faster, and more environmentally friendly than the growth on solid substrates [2]. However, getting insight into fundamental processes occurring on liquid metal catalysts during growth was up to now challenging, even impossible, due to harsh prevailing conditions inside CVD reactors, excluding most experimental methods. The LMCat (Liquid Metal Catalysis) EU Horizon 2020 FET-OPEN project aims to overcome these limitations by delivering instrumentation and methodology, allowing to study in situ and operando the growth of 2DMs on liquid metal surfaces.

In this contribution, I will present the first experimental results of graphene growth on liquid copper in a newly developed CVD reactor [3], dedicated to the study of chemical reactions on LMCats. By combining in situ synchrotron X-ray diffraction and optical microscopy, supported by ex situ Raman spectroscopy, we can resolve in real-time the growth dynamics and atomic structure of graphene during its growth on liquid copper [4,5]. Contrary to solid surfaces, this latter is an atomically smooth, isotropic, and mobile medium, which allows producing graphene crystals of high-quality and large sizes limited only by the size of the liquid bath surface. Furthermore, a myriad of intriguing growth scenarios was observed, which allowed to fine-tune the fabrication procedures and to identify critical factors affecting the growth of individual flakes, their self-assembly, and further association into a single layer with a coherent atomic structure. These findings open new possibilities for the growth of 2D materials with unprecedented control over growth kinetics, hardly achievable by any method up to now.

References

  1. Zavabeti, J.Z. Ou, B.J. Carey, N. Syed, R. Orrell-Trigg, E.L.H. Mayes, C. Xu, O. Kavehei, A.P. O’Mullane, R.B. Kaner, K. Kalantar-Zadeh, T. Daeneke, Science. 358 (2017) 332–335.
  2. D. Geng, B. Wu, Y. Guo, L. Huang, Y. Xue, J. Chen, G. Yu, L. Jiang, W. Hu, Y. Liu, PNAS. 109 (2012) 7992–7996.
  3. M. Saedi, J.M. de Voogd, A. Sjardin, A. Manikas, C. Galiotis, M. Jankowski, G. Renaud, F. La Porta, O. Konovalov, G.J.C. van Baarle, I.M.N. Groot, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 91 (2020) 013907.
  4. O.V. Konovalov, V. Belova, F. La Porta, M. Saedi, I.M.N. Groot, G. Renaud, I. Snigireva, A. Snigirev, M. Voevodina, C. Shen, A. Sartori, B.M. Murphy, M. Jankowski, J Synchrotron Rad. 29 (2022).
  5. M. Jankowski, M. Saedi, F. La Porta, A.C. Manikas, C. Tsakonas, J.S. Cingolani, M. Andersen, M. de Voogd, G.J.C. van Baarle, K. Reuter, C. Galiotis, G. Renaud, O.V. Konovalov, I.M.N. Groot, ACS Nano. 15 (2021) 9638–9648