Fig 2: a) C60 impinging on Cu (111). b) Excited electronic states visited during a TD-DFT simulation of C20 final configuration after cage breaking on Cu (111) surface at 14 eV (Corresponding to C60 at 42 eV). c) C20 final configuration after cage breaking on Cu (111) surface. d) Total electronic energy of the system during a metadynamics simulation starting from the configuration of a broken C60 cage on Cu (111) surface. e) Final configuration on the metadynamics-DFT simulation.
Topics: Buckminsterfullerene, C60, Condensed Matter Physics, Graphene, Electrical Engineering, Materials Science, Nanotechnology
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: Graphene is one of the wonder materials of our age. It is some 200 times stronger than steel, it is an extraordinary conductor of heat and electricity, and it is almost transparent. And yet making graphene is still tricky, particularly when it needs to sit on a substrate for applications such as electronics.
Today, Simone Taioli at the Trento Institute for Fundamental Physics and Applications in Italy and a few pals say they’ve worked out how to do it starting with the famous football-shaped molecule buckminsterfullerene.
Their idea is remarkably simple: bombard the substrate with buckyballs travelling at supersonic speeds. That’s fast enough to crack them open when they hit, and the resulting unzipped cages then bond together to form a graphene film.
Researchers have long thought of using buckyballs as a precursor for graphene. But the only way to get them to unzip and bind together is to heat them to temperatures in excess of around 600 °C.
Physics arXiv:
Towards room-temperature single-layer graphene synthesis by C60 Supersonic Molecular Beam Epitaxy
Roberta Tatti, Lucrezia Aversa, Roberto Verucchi, Emanuele Cavaliere, Giovanni Garberoglio, Nicola M. Pugno, Giorgio Speranza, Simone Taioli
No comments:
Post a Comment