Laser Controllable Growth of Graphene via Ni-Cu Alloy Composition Modulation

Graphene has many unique properties, most of them strongly depend on the number of layers. It is significant to develop a facile approach to realize the controllable growth of graphene with specific number of layers. We ever reported an efficient approach to grow graphene rapidly and locally by laser irradiation. In this work, we offers yet another important feature, to control the number of layers of graphene. Ni-Cu alloy has been reported to be used successfully as the catalyst for graphene growth with controllable number of layers. In that case, the Ni-Cu alloys with different compositions were normally formed by thermal evaporation. Here we provide an efficient way to fabricate the Ni-Cu alloy catalysts by laser cladding. Then the high power laser was employed to melt the Ni and Cu mixed powders. Different Ni-Cu alloy catalysts were formed in a high rate of 720 mm²/min with a thickness of 1.2 mm. Then the graphene with controllable layers was rapidly and locally grown on the Ni-Cu catalysts by laser irradiation at a high rate (18 cm²/min) at room temperature. We found that the Ni-Cu catalyst with 15 % Cu could be helpful to grow single layer graphene, which occupied 92.4 % of the entire film. Higher Cu content didn’t promote the growth due to the oxygen involved during the growth process. The controllable growth mechanism of graphene by laser processing was discussed. Combining the rapid catalyst fabrication and graphene synthesis make it a cost- and time-efficient method to produce the controllable graphene films.