NanoPorous Graphene
The advantage of having a very compact three-dimensional (3D) yet with very two-dimensional (2D) property graphene, pushed to synthesize it by using sacrificial nano-porous metal-based scaffolds, so to achieve millimeter-sized architectures of 3D warped and suspended graphene without compromising its remarkable 2D electrical, optical, and thermal properties.
We studied these bi-continuous nano- and micro-porous graphene (NPG and MPG) structures, characterised by the absence of frayed edges, borders and defects. The NPG and MPG samples (grown by Ito’s and Morandi’sgroups, at University of Tsukuba, Japan and at IMM-CNR in Bologna, respectively) are constituted by one-to-few layers graphene sheets with a very high 2D quality, with the expected linear behavior of the spectral density of electronic states towards the Fermi level; the intrinsic slight bond distortions at the highly bent regions have been identified by high spatially-resolved (200 nm) C 1s core-level photoemission.
The availability of high-quality and functionalized (doped) graphene in this 3D form opens new routes for a wide range of applications of the 2D graphene properties in 3D devices.
Relevant publications:
Di Bernardo I., Avvisati G., Chen C., Avila J., Asensio M. C., Hu K., Ito Y., Hines P., Lipton-Duffin J., Rintoul L., Motta N., Mariani C., Betti M. G., Topology and doping effects in three-dimensional nanoporous graphene, Carbon 131, 258-265 (2018)
Di Bernardo I., Avvisati G., Mariani C., Motta N., Chen C., Avila J., Asensio M. C., Lupi S., Ito Y., Chen M., Fujita T., Betti M. G., Two-dimensional hallmark of highly interconnected three-dimensional nanoporous graphene, ACS Omega 2, 3691-3697 (2017)