Chemically Induced Transformation of CVD-Grown Bilayer Graphene into Single Layer Diamond Authors: Pavel V. Bakharev1*, Ming Huang1,2, Manav Saxena1, Suk Woo Lee2, Se Hun Joo3, Sung O Park3, Jichen Dong1, Dulce Camacho-Mojica1, Sunghwan Jin1, Youngwoo Kwon1, Mandakini Biswal1, Feng Ding1, Sang Kyu Kwak1,3, Zonghoon Lee1,2 & Rodney S. Ruoff1,2,4* Affiliations: 1Center for Multidimensional Carbon Materials (CMCM), Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Ulsan 44919, Republic of Korea. 2School of Materials Science and Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Ulsan 44919, Republic of Korea. 3School of Energy and Chemical Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Ulsan 44919, Republic of Korea 4Department of Chemistry, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Ulsan 44919, Republic of Korea. *Correspondence to:
[email protected],
[email protected] (RSR);
[email protected] (PVB) Abstract: Notwithstanding numerous density functional studies on the chemically induced transformation of multilayer graphene into a diamond-like film, a comprehensive convincing experimental proof of such a conversion is still lacking. We show that the fluorination of graphene sheets in Bernal (AB)-stacked bilayer graphene (AB-BLG) grown by chemical vapor deposition on a single crystal CuNi(111) surface triggers the formation of interlayer carbon-carbon bonds, 1 resulting in a fluorinated diamond monolayer (‘F-diamane’). Induced by fluorine chemisorption, the phase transition from AB-BLG to single layer diamond was studied and verified by X-ray photoelectron, ultraviolet photoelectron, Raman, UV-Vis, electron energy loss spectroscopies, transmission electron microscopy, and DFT calculations. Graphene and diamond are two well-known carbon allotropes with sp2 and sp3 bonding hybridization, respectively, and are characterized by outstanding physical and chemical properties.