Ultrafast Growth of Large Area Graphene on Si Wafer by a Single Pulse Current

Graphene has many excellent optical, electrical and mechanical properties due to its unique two-dimensional structure. High-efficiency preparation of large area graphene film is the key to achieve its industrial applications. In this paper, an ultrafast quenching method was firstly carried out to flow a single pulse current through the surface of a Si wafer with a size of 10 mm × 10 mm for growing fully covered graphene film. The wafer surface was firstly coated with a 5-nm-thick carbon layer and then a 25-nm-thick nickel layer by magnetron sputtering. The optimum quenching conditions are a pulse current of 10 A and a pulse width of 2 s. The thus-prepared few-layered graphene film was proved to cover the substrate fully, showing a high conductivity. Our method is simple and highly efficient and does not need any high-power equipment. It is not limited by the size of the heating facility due to its self-heating feature, providing the potential to scale up the size of the substrates easily. Furthermore, this method can be applied to a variety of dielectric substrates, such as glass and quartz.