2009/06/15 by Leonardo C. Campos, Vitor R. Manfrinato, Javier Sanchez-Yamagishi +4 · 3 citations
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #2D Materials and Applications #Graphene and Nanomaterials Applications #Graphene research and applications #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.mtrl-sci
paper · pdf · doi:10.1021/nl900811r
Nano Letters 10.1021/nl900811r
openalex publication_date 2009/06/15 · arxiv created 2009/06/22 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We demonstrate anisotropic etching of single-layer graphene by thermally activated nickel nanoparticles. Using this technique, we obtain sub-10-nm nanoribbons and other graphene nanostructures with edges aligned along a single crystallographic direction. We observe a new catalytic channeling behavior, whereby etched cuts do not intersect, resulting in continuously connected geometries. Raman spectroscopy and electronic measurements show that the quality of the graphene is resilient under the etching conditions, indicating that this method may serve as a powerful technique to produce graphene nanocircuits with well-defined crystallographic edges.