Photo-thermal chemical vapor deposition growth of graphene

The growth of graphene on Ni using a photo-thermal chemical vapor deposition (PT-CVD) technique is reported. The non-thermal equilibrium nature of PT-CVD process resulted in a much shorter duration in both heating up and cooling down stages, thus allowing for a reduction in the overall growth time. Despite the reduced time for synthesis compared to standard thermal chemical vapor 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 process. Growth on Ni also allows for the alleviation of hydrogen blister damage that is commonly encountered during growth 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 OPV cell is found to be comparable to that reported using pristine graphene prepared by conventional CVD