Investigations of graphene and inorganic graphene analogues

Abstract

Carbon nanotubes and graphene are the two most studied materials today. Twodimensional graphene has specially attracted a lot of attention because of its unique electrical properties such as very high carrier mobility, quantum Hall effect at room temperature, ambipolar electric field effect along with ballistic transport of charge carriers.[1-3] Some other properties of graphene that are equally interesting include its unexpectedly broad absorption of light,[4] high elasticity,[5] unusual magnetic properties,[6] high surface area,[7] gas adsorption[8] and charge transfer interaction with molecules.[9] While graphene normally refers to a single-layer of sp 2 bonded carbon atoms, there are important investigations on bi- and few- layer graphenes as well. In the very first experimental study on graphene carried out by Novoselov et al.[1a] in 2004 was obtained using micromechanical cleavage from graphite. Since then, there has been much progress in the synthesis of graphene and a number of methods have been devised to prepare high quality single- and few-layer graphenes.