Growth of free-standing SnO nanostructures on single layer graphene

[Display omitted] •Free-standing nanostructures of SnO were densely grown on single layer graphene.•Uniform & large area free-standing nanostructures of SnO were grown on SLG.•Tilted nanostructures of SnO were grown on Si substrate, grown in same batch.•Free-standing SnO/graphene would be applied promising anode material of Li-ion battery. The physical properties of nano-sized metal oxide semiconductors are influenced by the nanostructures as well as the crystallinity, thus the growth of crystalline tin oxide (SnO) with controlled morphologies would be important to its applications. To date, the various morphologies of SnO have been successfully synthesized such as nanodisks, nanobelts, nanoplatelets, nanoslabs, nanoflowers, and nanobranches. Here, the vertical free-standing SnO nanostructures were densely grown on single layer graphene (SLG) by vapor transport method. Compared with the tilted SnO nanostructures on SiO2/Si substrate, surface area ratio of the free-standing SnO nanostructures exhibit over of 4.4 times. According to analysis results such as Raman spectroscopy, FE-SEM, XRD, and FE-TEM, uniform and high quality free-standing SnO nanostructures were grown on large area SLG. We observed that the synthetic shapes of SnO nanostructures are different depending on the presence or absence of graphene film on substrate.