Acetone and isopropanol – a new liquid precursor for the controllable transfer- and lithography-free CVD of graphene-like films

Liquid precursors are of high practical interest for the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of graphene and related materials. In terms of cost, safety and technological operability, the liquids are significantly more attractive than the conventional gas precursors. Another challenge to the technology is the direct deposition of carbon films on dielectric substrates without the transfer procedure. In the present work, we study the synthesis of graphene-like films (GLFs) on sapphire and SiO2/Si from two liquid precursors: acetone and isopropanol. GLFs in this work are defined as multi-layer graphene films with a crystallite size of several tens of nm. The films synthesized by CVD at different temperatures were characterized by the optical transmittance and sheet resistance; the structure of the films was studied by Raman spectroscopy. We show that such films have superior characteristics as compared to most literature data on direct CVD deposition from oxygen-containing liquid precursors. The films can be grown selectively on exposed areas of the e-beam pre-patterned substrate at specific deposition conditions. We demonstrate this by selectively growing a Hall bar microstructure for carrier mobility measurements.