Optical Spectroscopy Investigation of the Structural and Electrical Evolution of Controllably Oxidized Graphene by a Solution Method

A precisely controlled chemical modification of exfoliated graphene on a substrate was achieved by solution-phase oxidation. The structural and electrical evolution of graphene induced by oxygen-related defects was investigated using micro-Raman and photoluminescence spectroscopy. The sp 2 -hybrid carbon network in monolayer graphene was found to gradually decrease with increasing degree of oxidation. The size of the graphene quantum dots was finally reduced to about 1 nm, which exhibited an energy band gap of 2 eV. The double-layer graphene showed a symmetry breaking induced by the defects. The process of solution modification may provide a facile method to tailor the electrical properties of graphene on a chip for constructing carbon-based nanoelectronics.