Toward Scalable Growth for Single-Crystal Graphene on Polycrystalline Metal Foil

Abstract

Despite the enormous potential of the single-crystalline two-dimensional (2D) materials for a wide range of future innovations and applications, 2D single-crystals are still suffering in industrialization due to the lack of efficient large-area production methods. In this work, we introduce a general approach for the scalable growth of single-crystalline graphene, which is a representative 2D material, through "transplanting" uniaxially aligned graphene "seedlings" onto a larger-area catalytic growth substrate. By inducing homoepitaxial growth of graphene from the edges of the seeds arrays without additional nucleations, we obtained single-crystalline graphene with an area four times larger than the mother graphene seed substrate. Moreover, the defect-healing process eliminated the inherent defects of seeds, ensuring the reliability and crystallinity of the single-crystalline graphene for industrialization.