Nanoparticles hosted in conductive matrices are ubiquitous in electrochemical energy storage, catalysis and energetic devices. However, agglomeration and surface oxidation remain as two major challenges towards their ultimate utility, especially for highly reactive materials. Here we report uniformly distributed nanoparticles with diameters around 10 nm can be self-assembled within a reduced gr...

Transport measurements have revealed several exotic electronic properties of graphene. The possibility to influence the electronic structure and hence control the conductivity by adsorption or doping with adatoms is crucial in view of electronics applications. Here, we show that in contrast to expectation, the conductivity of graphene increases with increasing concentration of vacancy defects, ...

Nano-patterning of graphene film by a novel approach making use of laser ablation generated pressure is presented in this paper. Arrays of nanoscale holes were fabricated by applying laser shock pressure on graphene film suspended on well trenches in silicon substrate. Round holes with diameters ranging from 50 to 200 nm on graphene film were successfully punched. The critical pressure was foun...

The electrochemical sensing properties of graphene-based and carbon nanotube (CNT)-based electrodes towards ascorbic acid, dopamine, uric acid, and glucose are systematically compared. Nano-sized Pd catalyst particles are uniformly dispersed on both carbon supports using a supercritical fluid deposition technique to increase the sensing performance. The CNT/Pd electrode shows higher detection c...

We report the fabrication and characterization of a simple gate-free graphene device as a pH sensor. The graphene sheets are made by mechanical exfoliation. Platinum contact electrodes are fabricated with a mask-free process using a focused ion beam and then expanded by silver paint. Annealing is used to improve the electrical contact. The experiment on the fabricated graphene device shows that...

The buckling of graphene sheets on substrates can significantly degrade their performance in materials and devices. Therefore, a systematic investigation on the buckling behavior of monolayer graphene sheet/substrate systems is carried out in this paper by both molecular mechanics simulations and theoretical analysis. From 70 simulation cases of simple-supported graphene sheets with different s...

Inducing robust magnetic moments on the basal plane of the graphene sheet is very difficult, and is one of the greatest challenges in the study of physical chemistry of graphene materials. Theoretical studies predicted that introduction of a kind of sp(3)-type defects formed by OH groups is an effective pathway to achieve this goal [Boukhvalov, D. W. &Katsnelson, M. I. ACS Nano 5, 2440-2446 (20...

Recent progress of simulations/modeling at the atomic level has led to a better understanding of the mechanical behaviors of graphene, which include the linear elastic modulus E, the nonlinear elastic modulus D, the Poisson’s ratio ν, the intrinsic strength σint and the corresponding strain εint as well as the ultimate strain εmax (the fracture strain beyond which the graphene lattice will be u...

Properties of many layered materials, including copper- and iron-based superconductors, topological insulators, graphite and epitaxial graphene, can be manipulated by the inclusion of different atomic and molecular species between the layers via a process known as intercalation. For example, intercalation in graphite can lead to superconductivity and is crucial in the working cycle of modern ba...

Carrier dynamics in graphene films on CaF2 have been measured in the mid infrared region by femtosecond pump-probe spectroscopy. The relaxation kinetics shows two decay times. The fast time component is ~0.2 ps, which is attributed to the mixture of initial few ultrafast intraband and interband decay channels. The slow component is ~1.5 ps, which is primarily assigned to optical phonon-acoustic...