Easily Processable, Highly Transparent and Conducting Thiol-Functionalized Reduced Graphene Oxides Langmuir-Blodgett Films

We report synthesis and fabrication of highly thionated reduced graphene oxide and its Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) film without an LB trough. As the synthesized product, mercapto reduced graphene oxide (mRGO) contains high thiol content estimated from XPS, corresponding to a surface coverage of 1.3 SH/nm(2). The mRGO LB film shows two electronic transport properties, following Efros-Shklovskii variable-range hopping (VRH) and Mott VRH at low and high temperature, respectively. Optical and band gap of the LB film was estimated from Tauc plot and semi-logarithmic-scale plot of sheet resistance versus temperature to be 0.6 and 0.1 eV, respectively. Additionally, the sheet resistance of the mRGO LB film depends on the quantity of the thiol functional group with the same transmittance at 550 nm (500 k omega for mRGO, 1.3 M omega for tRGO with 92% transmittance).

Automated summary

The study reports the synthesis and fabrication of highly thionated reduced graphene oxide and its LB film, revealing sensitive electronic transport properties and optical characteristics of the film to the thiol content.