Photo-thermal chemical vapour deposition growth of graphene

The growth of graphene on Ni using a photo-thermal chemical vapour deposition (PT-CVD) technique is reported. The non-thermal equilibrium nature of the PT-CVD process resulted in a much shorter duration of the overall growth time for graphene in both the heating up and cooling down stages, thus allowing for the reduction. Despite the reduced time for synthesis compared to standard thermal chemical vapour deposition (T-CVD), there was no decrease in the quality of the graphene film produced. Furthermore, the graphene formation under PT-CVD is much less sensitive to cooling rate than that observed for T-CVD. Growth of graphene on Ni also allows for the alleviation of hydrogen blister damage that is commonly encountered on Cu substrates and a lower processing temperature. To characterize the film’s electrical and optical properties, we further report the use of pristine PT-CVD grown graphene as the transparent electrode material in an organic photovoltaic device (OPV) with poly(3-hexyl)thiophene (P3HT) / phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) as the active layer, where the power conversion efficiency of the cell is found to be comparable to that reported using pristine graphene prepared by conventional CVD.