Large area graphene and graphene oxide patterning and nanographene fabrication by one-step lithography

A cheap and green technology based on electro-erosion, performed at room conditions and scalable to large area (cm2) is demonstrated for structuring graphene and graphene oxide films on any substrate. This one-step technique based on electrical discharges produced by a direct current voltage source competes favorably with laser patterning. The threshold voltage for complete graphene elimination as determined by Raman mapping is around 20 V. At low relative humidity conditions (30%) the transformation to graphene oxide is also detected for operating voltages above 40 V, the oxidation being probably mediated by the residual adsorbed water at the surface. We also show the close correlation of atomic force microscopy (AFM) phase images with the modified graphene characteristics while AFM topographic images are dominated by extrinsic aspects. The use of a spring probe relaxes the requirement of precision for the tip-sample distance and sample flatness to around 10 μm which is very convenient for large scale applications. Furthermore, this technique allows the formation of high quality nanographene, with size around 18 nm, and graphene micro-ribbon lattices in a very fast way and very well defined edges, with dimensions down to 1 μm width and mm length, very promising for terahertz graphene plasmonic applications.X.D. acknowledges a FPI scholarship from Spanish MINECO and C.M. thanks financial support from the “Juan de la Cierva” postdoctoral program JCI-2011-08815. The research leading to these results has received funding from Spanish MINECO under projects MAT2012-37276-C03-01, MAT2012-37276-C03-03 and MAT2011-27470-C02-02, from Comunidad de Madrid under Project S2013/MIT-2740 (PHAMA_2.0-CM) as well as from the European Union Seventh Framework Program under grant agreement No. 604391 “Graphene Flagship.