Researchers make significant advance in graphene generation

A prominent advance in the high-yield generation of few-layer graphene via a novel, safe, rapid, and green procedure has just been described in an article published by a collaborative team featuring BGU's Prof. Jeffrey Gordon of the Alexandre Yersin Department of Solar Energy & Environmental Physics, Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research and Prof. H.T. Chua's group at the University of Western Australia (UWA, Perth), in the latest issue of one of the field's flagship journals, Carbon.

Graphene is a single atomic layer of pure carbon - the thinnest imaginable of materials. Its remarkable properties include high mechanical strength, high electrical conductivity, large surface area per gram, biocompatibility, and high transparency, with promising applications in energy storage devices. Graphene was discovered only 11 years ago, and the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for their groundbreaking graphene experiments.

The limitations of the methods developed to date for producing graphene subsume one or more of the following: requiring toxic chemicals, needing inordinately lengthy and cumbersome processes, sparse yields, or not being amenable to scale-up (which is essential for technological impact).

The lamp-ablation method developed collaboratively by the BGU and UWA groups surmounts all these shortcomings and, so far, has succeeded in generating few-layer graphene in high yields.

It involves a novel optical system (originally invented by BGU's Prof. Daniel Feuermann and Prof. Jeffrey Gordon) that reconstitutes the immense brightness within the plasma of high-power xenon discharge lamps at a remote reactor, where a transparent tube filled with simple, inexpensive graphite (the same material commonly used in pencils) is irradiated. The procedure is relatively fast, and devoid of any toxic or problematic substances (just graphite plus concentrated light), hence safe and green. 

The first experimental realisation reported in their journal article constitutes preliminary proof-of-concept. The BGU and UWA teams are now planning an experimental program for scaling up this initial success toward markedly improving the volume and rate at which few-layer (and eventually single-layer) graphene can be synthesized.