Impact of Amorphous-C/Ni Multilayers on Ni-Induced Layer Exchange for Multilayer Graphene on Insulators.

Layer exchange growth of amorphous carbon (a-C) is a unique technique for fabricating high-quality multilayer graphene (MLG) on insulators at low temperatures. We investigated the effects of the a-C/Ni multilayer structure on the quality of MLG formed by Ni-induced layer exchange. The crystal quality and electrical conductivity of MLG improved dramatically as the number of a-C/Ni multilayers increased. A 600 °C-annealed sample in which 15 layers of 4-nm-thick a-C and 0.5-nm-thick Ni were laminated recorded an electrical conductivity of 1430 S/cm. This value is close to that of highly oriented pyrolytic graphite synthesized at approximately 3000 °C. This improvement is likely related to the bond weakening in a-C due to the screening effect of Ni. We expect that these results will contribute to low-temperature synthesis of MLG using a solid-phase reaction with metals.