A general route towards defect and pore engineering in graphene

Defect engineering in graphene is important for tailoring graphene's properties thus applicable in various applications such as porous membranes and ultra-capacitors. In this paper, we report a general route towards defect- and pore- engineering in graphene through remote plasma treatments. Oxygen plasma irradiation was employed to create homogenous defects in graphene with controllable density from a few to ≈10(3) (μm(-2)). The created defects can be further enlarged into nanopores by hydrogen plasma anisotropic etching with well-defined pore size of a few nm or above. The achieved smallest nanopores are ≈2 nm in size, showing the potential for ultra-small graphene nanopores fabrication.