- Graphene, the one-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms, which is a boon for energy storage, coatings, sensors as well as superconductivity, is difficult to produce while retaining its single layered properties.
- A new low-cost method of upscaling production of graphene while preserving its single layered properties, developed by Indian scientists, may reduce the cost of producing this thinnest, strongest and most conductive material in the world.
- Researchers from Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), through their recent research work have upscaled graphene production while retaining its thin layered properties.
- This was made possible by a simple, affordable method wherein naphthalene coated nickel foil was heated for a few minutes in an ordinary vacuum by joule heating and was cooled to get twisted layers of graphene.
- Careful study using electronic diffraction and Raman scattering showed that the 2D single-crystal nature of the atomic lattice of the graphene is retained even in the multilayer stack.
- The twisted multilayer graphene that results is also highly conducting.
- The researchers used a combination of two techniques to understand and quantify how much single layer like behaviour exists in the graphene system.
- Raman spectroscopy—a technique to understand whether a graphene species has single layer like behaviour arising because of no interlayer interaction and
- Electron diffraction–a technique to study the morphology of the given twisted system.
