On Jan. 18th, the State Council of the People's Republic of China announced the winners of the National Nature Science Award. The fundamental research on the synthesis and applications of high-quality graphene materials carried out by Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science researches Drs. REN Wencai, CHENG Huiming, CHEN Zongping, WU Zhongshuai and GAO Libo was granted the seconded prize.
Graphene has attracted increasing interest since 2004 because of its unique structure, many fascinating properties and promising applications. The properties of graphene materials strongly depend on their structure such as the number of layers, defects, grain size, and functional groups. Therefore, the synthesis of high-quality graphene materials with controlled structures is essentially important not only for fundamental studies but also for technological applications. Since 2007, SYNL researchers have systematically studied the synthesis of high-quality graphene materials by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and chemical exfoliation, and explored their potential applications in energy storage, composites, optoelectronics, etc.
Until the end of 2013, more than 40 peer-reviewed papers have been published in Nat. Mater, Nat. Commun, PNAS, Adv. Mater., JACS, etc., and 16 patents have been granted. Prof. Ren and Prof. Cheng(the first two achievers) have been invited to write a “News and Views” editorial for Nature in 2013 and a commentary article entitled The Global Growth of Graphene for Nat Nanotechnol in 2014. The 8 representative papers have been cited 4,464 times by others (Web of Science) in Science, Nature, Nat. Mater., Nat. Nanotechnol, Adv. Mater., Chem. Soc. Rev., Prog. Mater. Sci., etc. The related main discoveries are summarized as follows:
(1) We have invented a template-directed CVD method for the synthesis of a novel graphene foam macrostructure with a three-dimensional (3D) interconnected network (Nat. Mater., 2011, 1185 citations), and demonstrated its use in high-performance elastic conductors (Nat. Mater., 2011, 1185 citations) and flexible lightweight electromagnetic interference shielding materials (Adv. Mater., 2013, 262 citations). The articale in Nature Mater, has been highlighted by Nature, Nature China, and NPG Asia Materials, and this method has been widely used by many research groups.
(2) We have developed an ambient-pressure CVD method with Pt as the substrate to achieve the growth of millimetre-size hexagonal single-crystal graphene domains (Nature Commun., 2012, 355 citations), and found the edge-dependent growth kinetics of graphene (PNAS, 2013, 42 citations). Moreover, we have developed a universal nondestructive electrochemical H2 bubbling method to transfer CVD-grown graphene to arbitrary substrates (Nature Commun., 2012, 355 citations; invention patents granted by China, US, Europe, and Japan), which allows the repeated use of the metal growth substrates.
(3) We have designed and fabricated a series of graphene sheet/metal oxide nanoparticle composite electrode materials to greatly improve the performance of lithium ion batteries and supercapacitors, and elucidated the synergistic effect between the graphene sheets and metal oxides in the composites (ACS Nano, 2010, 1206 citations; Adv. Funct. Mater., 2010, 540 citations).
(4) We have developed a hydrogen arc discharge exfoliation and reduction method for the synthesis of graphene sheets with excellent electrical conductivity and good thermal stability (ACS Nano, 2009, 311 citations). Moreover, a simple but highly-efficient hydrohalic acid reducing method has been invented to reduce graphene oxide films into highly conductive graphene films without destroying their integrity and flexibility based on a nucleophilic substitution reaction (Carbon, 2010, 563 citations), which has been widely used by many groups.