On the use of Raman spectroscopy to characterize mass-produced graphene nanoplatelets


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Date

2023-04-24

Publication Type

Journal Article

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yes

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Abstract

Raman spectroscopy is one of the most common methods to characterize graphene-related 2D materials, providing information on a wide range of physical and chemical properties. Because of typical sample inhomogeneity, Raman spectra are acquired from several locations across a sample, and analysis is carried out on the averaged spectrum from all locations. This is then used to char-acterize the "quality" of the graphene produced, in particular the level of exfoliation for top-down manufactured materials. Howev-er, these have generally been developed using samples prepared with careful separation of unexfoliated materials. In this work we assess these metrics when applied to non-ideal samples, where unexfoliated graphite has been deliberately added to the exfoliated material. We demonstrate that previously published metrics, when applied to averaged spectra, do not allow the presence of this unexfoliated material to be reliably detected. Furthermore, when a sufficiently large number of spectra are acquired, it is found that by processing and classifying individual spectra, rather than the averaged spectrum, it is possible to identify the presence of this ma-terial in the sample, although quantification of the amount remains approximate. We therefore recommend this approach as a robust methodology for reliable characterization of mass-produced graphene-related 2D materials using confocal Raman spectroscopy.

Publication status

published

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Volume

14

Pages / Article No.

509 - 521

Publisher

Beilstein-Institut zur Förderung der Chemischen Wissenschaften

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Subject

few-layer graphene; graphene; metrology; quality control; Raman spectroscopy

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