Tailoring Electrical Transport Across Grain Boundaries in Polycrystalline Graphene

• DOI: 10.1126/science.1218948
• Publication Date: 2012-05-31T18:20:39Z
• Authors: Adam W. Tsen; Lola Brown; Mark P. Levendorf; Fereshte Ghahari; Pinshane Y. Huang; Robin W. Havener; Carlos S. Ruiz-Va...; David A. Muller; Philip Kim; Jiwoong Park
• Keywords: 01 natural sciences; 0104 chemical sciences

Graphene produced by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is polycrystalline, and scattering of charge carriers at grain boundaries (GBs) could degrade its performance relative to exfoliated, single-crystal graphene. However, the electrical properties GBs have so far been addressed indirectly without simultaneous knowledge their locations structures. We present measurements on individual in CVD graphene first imaged transmission electron microscopy. Unexpectedly, conductance improves one order magnitude for with better interdomain connectivity. Our study suggests that polycrystalline good stitching may allow uniformly high rivaling exfoliated samples, which we demonstrate using optimized growth conditions device geometry.