Nitrogen cluster doping for high-mobility/conductivity graphene films with millimeter-sized domains

Abstract

Copyright © 2019 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).Directly incorporating heteroatoms into the hexagonal lattice of graphene during growth has been widely used to tune its electrical properties with superior doping stability, uniformity, and scalability. However the introduction of scattering centers limits this technique because of reduced carrier mobilities and conductivities of the resulting material. Here, we demonstrate a rapid growth of graphitic nitrogen cluster-doped monolayer graphene single crystals on Cu foil with remarkable carrier mobility of 13,000 cm2 V−1 s−1 and a greatly reduced sheet resistance of only 130 ohms square−1. The exceedingly large carrier mobility with high n-doping level was realized by (i) incorporation of nitrogen-terminated carbon clusters to suppress the carrier scattering and (ii) elimination of all defective pyridinic nitrogen centers by oxygen etching. Our study opens up an avenue for the growth of high-mobility/conductivity doped graphene with tunable work functions for scalable graphene-based electronic and device applications