Synthesis of Graphene Sheets and Their Interface Formation with Metals and Organic Semiconductors

Graphene is a several-angstrom-thick planar sheet of sp2-bonded carbon atoms densely packed in a honeycomb lattice. This unique structure exhibits many extraordinary electrical and mechanical properties such as non-dispersive transport characteristics, ambipolar electric field effect, ultra-high electron mobility, etc. Therefore, graphene is considered as a promising material for use in organic optoelectronic and electronic devices.Before such possibilities become reality, there are still plenty of scientific issues to be resolved. First, there is a lack of a reliable and reproducible technique which can controllably synthesize high-quality and mono-layer or few-layer graphene. Second, though graphene possesses outstanding electron transport characteristics, so far there are few relevant studies to evaluate the application of graphene for organic optoelectronic and electronic devices. Up to the present, there is also no corresponding research regarding the surface electronic structure of graphene and its interface formation with different organic charge-transport/luminescent materials and metals. Therefore, this project aims to:develop effective methodologies to synthesize graphene samples consisting of different compositional percentages of single-layer sheets;study the surface properties of graphene; andstudy the metal-graphene and the graphene-organic interfaces by using various surface analytical techniques.