A group of researchers from Shanghai report that Coronene can be used as nucleation seeds for graphene synthesis using a low temperature CVD process. The Coronene greatly improved the homogeneity of monolayer graphene.
The researchers say that adding Coronene to the CVD process may offer cost advantages for large scale applications, and also higher quality graphene sheets. They also expect this process to help with synthesizing graphene/copper hybrid interconnects.
In this research, Naphthalene was used as the solid carbon source, and adding the Coronene suppressed uncontrolled nucleation and multilayer growth of graphene domains. They say that the graphene synthesized with the added Coronene obtained a carrier mobility considerably higher than that of a similar graphene obtained without the Coronene seeds.
Coronene was also studied as an alternative material for graphene in transistors. In 2010 researchers from Germany, China and the US developed transistors made from Coronene which showed an improved band gap compared to similar graphene based transistors.
Coronene is now offered in high quality (97% purity) and relatively low cost online at The Graphene Supermarket. As this material may prove to be an interesting path towards low-cost high-quality graphene synthesis, it will be interesting to see if researchers and/or commercial companies adopt Coronene in their process.