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Graphene: Tunable superdoping

Nature Energy volume 1, Article number: 16041 (2016) Cite this article

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Doping graphitic materials is desirable to enhance their performance for energy conversion and storage applications, but achieving high dopant concentrations remains a challenge. Researchers now demonstrate synthesis of such materials with very high doping levels and facile tunability.

Graphene-based materials are promising for a wide range of applications in energy conversion and storage. Low-dimensional graphitic materials (LDGMs) — including 2D graphene sheets, 1D carbon nanotubes, and 0D graphene quantum dots — possess diverse molecular architectures, but share the common building-block of a graphitic honeycomb network with alternating C–C single and C=C double bonds1. Due to the delocalization of π electrons in the conjugated all-carbon structure, the charge distribution in LDGMs is susceptible to modification by replacing some of the carbon atoms with heteroatoms of a different electronegativity (for example, nitrogen, sulfur, boron or phosphorus). The doping-induced charge redistribution gives rise to changes in the electronic, magnetic and optical properties of the materials. Often, properties such as catalytic activity and conductivity — important for many potential applications including energy conversion and storage — improve with increasing dopant concentration, therefore it is desirable to prepare materials with high dopant levels. Furthermore, to obtain materials with uniform, reproducible properties and high stability, a homogenous dopant distribution is also important. However, it remains a challenge to uniformly dope LDGMs with heteroatoms at high concentrations in a controllable manner, limiting both the practical application and fundamental understanding of heteroatom-doped LDGMs. Writing in Nature Communications, Litao Sun, Nujiang Tang, Hui-Ming Cheng and colleagues in China now report a facile, but effective and versatile ‘superdoping’ approach towards synthesis of highly-doped LDGMs in which the level of heteroatom doping can be precisely controlled over a wide range for specific applications2.

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Figure 1: Superdoping low-dimensional graphene materials.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Liming Dai is in the Department of Macromolecular Science and Engineering, Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), Cleveland, Ohio 44106, USA, and the BUCT-CWRU International Joint Laboratory, College of Energy, Beijing University of Chemical Technology (BUCT), Beijing 100029, China.,

    Liming Dai

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Correspondence to Liming Dai.

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Dai, L. Graphene: Tunable superdoping. Nat Energy 1, 16041 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nenergy.2016.41

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nenergy.2016.41

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