Oxygen-Free Chemical Vapor Deposition Method to Make Graphene

Graphene has been called “the wonder material of the 21st century.” But graphene has a dirty little secret: it’s dirty. Now, engineers at Columbia University and colleagues at the University of Montreal and the National Institute of Standards and Technology are poised to clean things up with an oxygen-free chemical vapor deposition (OF-CVD) method that can create high-quality graphene samples at scale. Their work, published in Nature, directly demonstrates how trace oxygen affects the growth rate of graphene and identifies the link between oxygen and graphene quality for the first time.