Probing the Nature of Defects in Graphene by Raman Spectroscopy

Axel Eckmann†, Alexandre Felten‡§, ArtemMishchenko, Liam Britnell, Ralph Krupke§, Kostya S. Novoselov, and Cinzia Casiraghi*†‡

^† School of Chemistry and Photon Science Institute,University of Manchester, United Kingdom

^‡ Physics Department, Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany

^§ Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

 School of Physics and Astronomy,University of Manchester, United Kingdom

Nano Lett., Article ASAP

DOI: 10.1021/nl300901a

Publication Date (Web): July 5, 2012

Copyright © 2012 American Chemical Society

Raman spectroscopy is able to probe disorder in graphene through defect-activated peaks. It is of great interest to link these features to the nature of disorder. Here we present a detailed analysis of the Raman spectra of graphene containing different type of defects. We found that the intensity ratio of the D and D′ peak is maximum (13) for sp³-defects, it decreases for vacancy-like defects (7), and it reaches a minimum for boundaries in graphite (3.5). This makes Raman Spectroscopy a powerful tool to fully characterize graphene.