New Tools For Graphene Growth by the Gladiator Consortium

Due to its excellent properties, graphene is set to make an impact across a wide range of industries. Scalable production is one of the most important challenges. At Graphene Week in Athens, scientists from the European project Gladiator presented a new technique to monitor the growth of graphene, aiming to improve the quality and reduce the fabrication costs. 

"Its properties have the potential to revolutionise existing products and open up new markets that will benefit our daily lives," said Stergios Logothetidis, the Director of the Nanotechnology Lab LTFN and the Center for Printed and Organic Electronics in Hellas (COPE-H) (Greece).

This scientist is one of hundreds of researchers who participated in Graphene Week in Athens (Greece), an annual conference that brings together the world's leading experts in graphene and related materials and this year has chosen the Greek capital as its headquarters.

One of the key targets of graphene research is to produce it in large scales and at low cost. This is the aim of the European project Gladiator. Argiris Laskarakis, Head of the Organic Electronics Group at the LTFN and COPE-H, is one of Gladiator partners; at the Athens conference, the Gladiator researchers described the tools they have designed to develop "high quality, reliable and reproducible graphene", asserts Laskarakis.

Quality without triggering high costs

To produce graphene on a large scale, one of the techniques used is chemical vapour deposition (CVD). The Gladiator consortium has developed new tools to monitor the development of graphene on substrates such as copper and nickel, in real time and on-site. According to the researchers, those tools could be used both in laboratories and on an industrial scale. Having these tools available makes it easier to adjust parameters to optimise graphene growth, ensuring reproducible quality and reduced waste.

Potential applications of graphene include transparent electrodes in solar photovoltaic cells or in large-surface-area organic electronics.

Graphene’s flexibility is also ideal for flexible electronic devices - a large potential market. In addition, this material can be used in organic light-emitting diodes, now being widely used to replace LCD and plasma screens.

Gladiator is a partnering project of the Graphene Flagship, one of the Flagship Future and Emerging Technology Research Initiatives (FET Flagships).

A. Laskarakis, A. Zachariadis, E.M. Pechlivani, A. Papamichail, V. Matskos, J. P. Gaston, A. Jouvray y S. Logothetidis. “In-Situ and Real-Time Spectroscopic Ellipsometry monitoring of Graphene growth by Chemical Vapour Deposition”. Graphene Week. September 25 to 29, 2017, Athens (Greece).

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SINC produces scientific news for the European project SCOPE, coordinated by FECYT and funded by the European Union through Horizon 2020, its funding program. The SCOPE mission is to communicate visionary research results of partnering projects in the framework of the Graphene Flagship and the Human Brain Project, as well as to enhance the FET Flagships partnering environment in the European Union.

This is an edited version of a piece produced by SINC which was first published on September 27 2017 under a Creative Commons Licence.

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