Birong Luo, Patrick R. Whelan, Abhay Shivayogimath, Peter Bøggild, Timothy J. Booth
DTU Nanotech, Dept of Micro- and Nanotechnology, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark It is shown that Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) grown graphene films possess many defects and grain boundaries, which could lead degradation of material quality at where this graphene coating breaks down[1,2]. In this regard, how to detect then try to reduce the defects is crucial for the control of the quality of resulting CVD graphene. Here, oxidation of Cu grown graphene is used as quality control technique to feed back the results of CVD growth of graphene by a combination with optical microscope. We find the nucleation of graphene during CVD is quite critical for the formation of some defects such as pin holes and accumulation of amorphous carbon. This plays a significant role in the thermal oxidation of graphene and Cu in the air. It is shown that the oxidation starts from the nucleation site of graphene, then diffuse in the 2D plane. More important, the morphology of the oxidized Cu is quite similar with the graphene shape. Our results demonstrate the oxidation behavior of Cu coated by CVD graphene is highly correlated with graphene’s structural quality, which is of fundamental importance in understanding the mechanism of corrosion protection of graphene. 1. Schriver. M et al., ACS Nano., 2013, 7, pp. 5763-5768 2. Huang, P et al., Nature., 2011, 469, pp. 389-292
Birong Luo is currently a postdoc of Nanocarbon group at Nanotech in DTU. He is primarily interested in the CVD growth and properties of atomically thin materials such as graphene, hBN and other transition metal dichalcogenides. He received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry (2011) from the Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he studied the controlled growth and properties of CVD graphene. | 
