Targeted removal of copper foil surface impurities for improved synthesis of CVD graphene

Murdock, Adrian T. and van Engers, Christian D. and Britton, Jude and Babenko, Vitaliy and Meysami, Seyyed Shayan and Bishop, Hugh and Crossley, Alison and Koós, Antal Adolf and Grobert, Nicole (2017) Targeted removal of copper foil surface impurities for improved synthesis of CVD graphene. Carbon, 122. pp. 207-216. ISSN 0008-6223

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Abstract

Commercially available Cu foils are leading candidates as substrates employed for the generation of large-area graphene using chemical vapour deposition (CVD) techniques. However, the growth of highquality graphene on Cu foils is often hindered by contamination particles, which will also be detrimental for many potential applications of graphene. Here we investigate the influence of typical substrate impurities on the formation of CVD graphene using as-received Cu foils of various purities from different suppliers and the same cleaned by popular methods. Analytical characterisation of the Cu foils revealed that contamination particles consist of calcium, aluminium, and silicon oxides. We show that contamination particles are present on foils with purities ranging between 99.8% and 99.9999% and that these particles influence the nucleation density, growth rate, and growth features of graphene domains. Based on our findings we propose new industrially applicable targeted cleaning procedures of immersion in purposely-selected HCl and KOH solutions to chemically dissolve the aforementioned impurities, bringing about improved growth of graphene.

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