Researchers: Unusually broad diffraction background marks high-quality graphene

Date posted
Funding Agency
(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)

How do we know when graphene, the most widely studied 2-D material, is a defect-free and uniform layer of atoms? Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory have discovered an indicator that reliably demonstrates a sample's high quality. The researchers were investigating samples of graphene using low-energy electron diffraction and realized that a broad band of diffuse diffraction in the background was actually an intrinsic feature of graphene, but that broad band of diffuse diffraction had been ignored for the past 25 years.