The growth of inch-scale high-quality graphene on insulating substrates is desirable for electronic and optoelectronic applications, but remains challenging due to the lack of metal catalysis. According to article published in Nature Materials, scientists now demonstrate the wafer-scale synthesis of adlayer-free ultra-flat single-crystal monolayer graphene on sapphire substrates.

Talking to Materials Science Society of Pakistan (MSSP), one of the co-authors of the study, Abdus Samad (originally from Pakistan) , told that our work provides a method to directly synthesize ultra-high-quality graphene on insulating substrates, which not only solves most problems of Cu-based CVD-grown graphene, but also avoids the secondary contamination and damage caused by transferring processes. The as-grown graphene can be used on most high-performance nanodevices instead of physically exfoliated graphene flakes. Due to the influence of graphene grain boundaries and wrinkles, the application of graphene in the CPU chip industry could not yet be achieved. However, owing to the single-crystal, adlayer-free, and wrinkle-free properties, the direct-grown graphene is expected to be used on the graphene-based CPU chip industry and fulfill the application in the next-generation carbon-based semiconductors.

Moreover, the realization of large-area single-crystal graphene films also provides an ideal growth substrate for epitaxial growing other wafer-scale 2D materials and heterostructures, accelerating the coming of the era of wafer-scale single-crystal 2D materials.