The growth mechanism of few-layer graphene in the arc discharge process

While few-layered graphene (FG) has been synthesized by several different arc-discharge methods, its growing mechanism has hardly been studied by experiment. Here, we have investigated systematically its growth mechanism using the arc-discharge method under different environments including helium, oxygen-helium and hydrogen-helium. The results indicate that FG can only be produced in the presence of reactive gases, implying that the growing mechanism of few-layered graphene involves graphite evaporation and reactive-gas-confining crystallization of the evaporated carbon clusters. The key factor inducing the discrepancies in FG synthesis under different buffer gases can be assigned to the reactivity of corresponding gases. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.