Graphene Wrinkles Enable Spatially Defined Chemistry

Nano Lett. 2019 Aug 14;19(8):5640-5646. doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.9b02178. Epub 2019 Jul 11.

Abstract

This paper reports a scalable approach to achieve spatially selective graphene functionalization using multiscale wrinkles. Graphene wrinkles were formed by relieving the strain in thermoplastic polystyrene substrates conformally coated with fluoropolymer and graphene skin layers. Chemical reactivity of a fluorination process could be tuned by changing the local curvature of the graphene nanostructures. Patterned areas of graphene nanowrinkles and crumples followed by a single-process plasma reaction resulted in substrates with regions having different fluorination levels. Notably, conductivity of the functionalized graphene nanostructures could be locally tuned as a function of feature size without affecting the mechanical properties.

Keywords: Graphene functionalization; crumples; lateral heterostructure; multiscale wrinkles; spatially defined properties.