Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Graphene production

New solutions to a new problem

Nature Nanotechnology volume 3, pages 528–529 (2008)Cite this article

Two independent teams have shown that it is possible to produce stable suspensions of single-layer graphene from graphite crystals using chemical techniques.

Graphene — a single layer of carbon atoms — stepped out of the textbooks and into reality in 2004 when researchers used 'scotch tape' to peel off micrometre-wide sheets of this novel material from a sample of crystalline graphite1. Remarkably, a single layer of graphene resting on a silicon dioxide substrate can be seen by a trained eye with a good optical microscope. Exhibiting unusual physical and electronic properties, as well as excellent charge-carrier mobility, graphene quickly grabbed the attention of physicists and engineers, who hope that it might, one day, compete with silicon to be the material of choice for certain applications in electronics2.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Relevant articles

Open Access articles citing this article.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Get just this article for as long as you need it

$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Small-angle dark-field transmission electron microscope image of a defect-free graphene monolayer that has been deposited by Coleman and co-workers5 from a liquid-phase dispersion onto the microscope grid (also made of carbon).

References

  1. Novoselov, K. S. et al. Science 306, 666–669 (2004).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  2. Freitag, M. Nature Nanotech. 3, 455–457 (2008).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Berger, C. et al. J. Phys. Chem. B 108, 19912–19916 (2004).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  4. Li, X. et al. Nature Nanotech. 3, 538–542 (2008).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  5. Hernandez, Y. et al. Nature Nanotech. 3, 563–568 (2008).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  6. Li, X. L., Wang, X. R., Zhang, L., Lee, S. W. & Dai, H. J. Science 319, 1229–1232 (2008).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  7. Blake, P. et al. Nano Lett. 8, 1704–1708 (2008).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Stankovich, S. et al. Carbon 45, 1558–1565 (2007).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  9. Gomez-Navarro, C. et al. Nano Lett. 7, 3499–3503 (2007).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  10. Li, D., Muller, M. B., Gilje, S., Kaner, R. B. & Wallace, G. G. Nature Nanotech. 3, 101–105 (2008).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  11. Ruoff, R. Nature Nanotech. 3, 10–11 (2008).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jun Zhu is in the Department of Physics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA. jzhu@phys.psu.edu,

    Jun Zhu

Authors
  1. Jun Zhu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Zhu, J. New solutions to a new problem. Nature Nanotech 3, 528–529 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2008.249

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2008.249

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Find nanotechnology articles, nanomaterial data and patents all in one place. Visit Nano by Nature Research