Laser-induced etching of few-layer graphene synthesized by Rapid-Chemical Vapour Deposition on Cu thin films

The outstanding electrical and mechanical properties of graphene make it very attractive for several applications, Nanoelectronics above all. However a reproducible and non destructive way to produce high quality, large-scale area, single layer graphene sheets is still lacking. Chemical Vapour Deposition of graphene on Cu catalytic thin films represents a promising method to reach this goal, because of the low temperatures (T < 950°C−1000°C) involved during the process and of the theoretically expected monolayer self-limiting growth. On the contrary such self-limiting growth is not commonly observed in experiments, thus making the development of techniques allowing for a better control of graphene growth highly desirable. Here we report about the local ablation effect, arising in Raman analysis, due to the heat transfer induced by the laser incident beam onto the graphene sample.