Novel Synthetic Approaches for High-Mobility Graphene—From Decoupled Graphene on Cu/Sapphire to Artificial Intelligence Assisted Growth

The scalable synthesis of graphene over flat and rigid templates – displaying quality comparable to that of mechanically exfoliated crystals – has become a central topic in the last years, as it would enable several high-end applications, scalable twistronic devices, and pave the way to enticing quantum technologies. In this talk, I will introduce the growth via non-reducing chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of decoupled graphene on crystalline Cu films deposited on sapphire. The resulting graphene is lying atop a thin Cu₂O layer, and is charge neutral, low strained, and easy to transfer. Electrical transport measurements reveal unprecedented room temperature carrier mobilities for graphene grown on rigid substrates, exceeding 10⁵ cm^-2V^-1s^-1 when encapsulated in hexagonal boron nitride [1], thus opening realistic pathways for graphene-based high-end applications, including the exploration of innovative quantum platforms. Finally, I will discuss the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in materials science by demonstrating artificial neural network (ANN) assisted growth of high-quality graphene [2].<br/><br/>[1] Z. M. Gebeyehu, V. Mišeikis, S. Forti, N. Mishra, A. Boschi, A. Rossi, L. Martini, M. W. Ochapski, G. Piccinini, K. Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, Fabio Beltram, Sergio Pezzini, Camilla Coletti, under review.<br/>[2] Sabattini et al., in preparation.