Ultra-Easy and Fast Method for Transferring Graphene Grown on Metal Foil

Abstract

Growing graphene on a large scale is the first step towards its industrial application. The most widely used large-scale graphene growth method is chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on metal foil. Transferring large-scale graphene without damaging it or degrading its performance is also very important. Generally, techniques for transferring CVD-grown graphene involve metal-foil etching. In this case, the metal etchant can chemically alter the graphene and small amounts of metal residue still remain after etching. These metal residues change the properties of the transferred graphene. In this paper, we demonstrate a new technique for transferring CVD-grown graphene films onto arbitrary substrates using Crystalbond, an off-the-shelf adhesive material. This new method is very simple, easy, and fast. It also solves the aforementioned problems associated with metal etching, by using mechanical exfoliation of graphene via the high adhesive strength of Crystalbond. We transferred a similar to 1cm size piece of graphene, which exhibited reasonable optical and electrical properties, as observed using Raman spectroscopy and field effect transistor (FET) measurements, respectively.