UC Riverside

Graphene holds great potential as an electronic material because of its excellent transport properties, which derive from its unique Fermi surface and ballistic conductance. It exhibits extremely high mobility [~250,000 cm*2/(V*s)]. Despite its extraordinary properties, the absence of a band-gap in graphene makes it unsuitable for its use as an active element in conventional field effect transistors (FETs). Another problem with pristine graphene is its lack of solution processability, which inhibits it applications in numerous fields such as printed electronics, transparent conductors, nano-biodevices, and thin film technologies involving fuel cells, capacitors and solar cells.

My thesis is focused on addressing theses issue by application of covalent chemistry on graphene. We have applied the Kolbe electro-oxidation strategy to achieve an efficient quasi-reversible electrochemical grafting of the naphthylmethyl radicals to graphene. The method facilitates reversible bandgap engineering in graphene and preparation of electrochemically erasable organic dielectric films. We have discovered that the zero-band-gap electronic structure of graphene enables it to function as either the diene or the dienophile in the Diels−Alder (DA) reaction, and this versatile synthetic method offers a powerful strategy for the reversible modification of the electronic properties of graphene under very mild conditions. We show that the application of the Diels-Alder (DA) chemistry to graphene, which is capable of simultaneous formation of a pair of sp3-carbon centers (balanced divacancies) in graphene, can selectively produce DA-modified graphene FET devices with mobility between 1,000-6,000 cm2V-1s-1 (with a variable range hopping transport mechanism).

Most of the covalent chemistry applied on graphene leads to the change in hybridization of graphene sp2 carbon to sp3 (destructive hybridization) and the FET devices based on such covalently modified graphene shows a drastic reduction of device mobility. To this end, we find that the organometallic hexahapto metal complexation chemistry of graphene, in which the graphene pi-band constructively hybridizes with the vacant d-orbitals of transition metals, allows the fabrication of field effect devices which retain a high degree of the mobility with enhanced on-off ratio.

In summary, we find that the singular electronic structure of graphene at the Dirac point governs the chemical reactivity of graphene and this chemistry will play a vital role in propelling graphene to assume its role as the next generation electronic material beyond silicon.