GRAPHENE Pushing the boundaries

Various studies are focused towards advances in the growth of two-dimensional (2D) structures, such as graphene. In these studies researchers are faced with a challenge to control the early stages of nucleation and growth of the material on preferred metal surfaces, such as copper, and create large grains that would essentially present single-crystal graphene domains. As a result nucleation sites are created that are located far from each other and single crystalline domains are grown that are fast enough so that no additional nucleation sites can emerge. Li et al. has proposed a new method that allows the growth of large single-crystal domains of monolayer graphene reaching lateral sizes of a fraction of a millimetre. The zigzag-edge hexagonal domains observed by Yu et al. may systematically yield exactly this type of translational grain boundary and serve as metallic wire.