Pattern evolution characterizes the mechanism and efficiency of CVD graphene growth

Growing large-area, high-quality monolayers is the holy grail of graphene synthesis. In this work, the efficiency of graphene growth and the quality of their continuous films are explored through the time evolution of individual domains and their surface coverage on the substrate. Our phase-field modeling results and experimental characterization clearly demonstrate the critical roles of the deposition flux, edge-reaction kinetics and the surface diffusion of active carbon sources in modulating the pattern evolution and rate of growth. We find that the contrast between the edge-kinetics-limited and surfacediffusion-limited regimes is remarkable, which can be characterized by the evolution of domain patterns and considered as an indicator of the growth regime. However, common features exist in these two regimes, showing that the growth rate scales with time as t(2) in the early stage of growth and is regime-independent, which is explained by the coarsen profiles of carbon concentration for both the compact and dendritic domains. The rate decays rapidly in the final stage of growth due to the competition between neighboring domains on the limited carbon sources diffusing on the substrate, which is highly regime-sensitive and extremely low in the surface-diffusion-limited regime with narrow gaps between the domains to be filled. Based on these findings, synthesis strategies to improve the growth efficiency and film quality are discussed. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.