Aviv Zohman
Major/Minor: Software Engineering/Analytics
Title: Synthesizing Graphene
Abstract: Common methods of producing graphene include top-down and bottom-up processes. The top-down approach starts with graphite (the common carbon allotrope) and exfoliates it layer by layer into graphene sheets. The bottom-up approach starts with a blank surface onto which a chemical vapor is deposited to create a single graphene layer. These two methods have their pros and cons. The former is inexpensive, but requires toxic chemicals and lacks efficient delamination, resulting in contaminated few-layer graphene. The latter requires extreme temperatures, creating wrinkled and cracked graphene, but consistently produces monolayer sheets. Here we investigate and optimize these two approaches' corresponding production methods. We use nontoxic solvents and creative geometries for top-down techniques, and novel gas precursors and microwave-induced plasma in the bottom-up approach, thereby determining a procedure to produce pure graphene in large quantities.