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Updated: Jun 17, 2026

Scalable Syntheses of Graphene Oxide and Reduced Graphene Oxide using Cascade Design Oxidation and Highly Basic Reduction Reactions
Published on: July 3, 2025
Oxidation states of graphene: insights from computational spectroscopy
Wenhua Zhang1, Vincenzo Carravetta, Zhenyu Li
1Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China.
Abstract:
When it is oxidized, graphite can be easily exfoliated forming graphene oxide (GO). GO is a critical intermediate for massive production of graphene, and it is also an important material with various application potentials. With many different oxidation species randomly distributed on the basal plane, GO has a complicated nonstoichiometric atomic structure that is still not well understood in spite of intensive studies involving many experimental techniques. Controversies often exist in experimental data interpretation. We report here a first principles study on binding energy of carbon 1s orbital in GO. The calculated results can be well used to interpret experimental x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) data and provide a unified spectral assignment. Based on the first principles understanding of XPS, a GO structure model containing new oxidation species epoxy pair and epoxy-hydroxy pair is proposed. Our results demonstrate that first principles computational spectroscopy provides a powerful means to investigate GO structure.
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