Grains and grain boundaries in single-layer graphene atomic patchwork quilts

The properties of polycrystalline materials are often dominated by the size of their grains and by the atomic structure of their grain boundaries. These effects should be especially pronounced in two-dimensional materials, where even a line defect can divide and disrupt a crystal. These issues take on practical significance in graphene, which is a hexagonal, two-dimensional crystal of carbon atoms. Single-atom-thick graphene sheets can now be produced by chemical vapour deposition^{1, 2, 3} on scales of up to metres⁴, making their polycrystallinity almost unavoidable. Theoretically, graphene grain boundaries are predicted to have distinct electronic^{5, 6, 7, 8}, magnetic⁹, chemical¹⁰ and mechanical^{11, 12, 13} properties that strongly depend on their atomic arrangement. Yet because of the five-order-of-magnitude size difference between grains and the atoms at grain boundaries, few experiments have fully explored the graphene grain structure. Here we use a combination of old and new transmission electron microscopy techniques to bridge these length scales. Using atomic-resolution imaging, we determine the location and identity of every atom at a grain boundary and find that different grains stitch together predominantly through pentagon–heptagon pairs. Rather than individually imaging the several billion atoms in each grain, we use diffraction-filtered imaging¹⁴ to rapidly map the location, orientation and shape of several hundred grains and boundaries, where only a handful have been previously reported^{15, 16, 17, 18, 19}. The resulting images reveal an unexpectedly small and intricate patchwork of grains connected by tilt boundaries. By correlating grain imaging with scanning probe and transport measurements, we show that these grain boundaries severely weaken the mechanical strength of graphene membranes but do not as drastically alter their electrical properties. These techniques open a new window for studies on the structure, properties and control of grains and grain boundaries in graphene and other two-dimensional materials.

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