All the more reason to clean up after your dog

As many readers of this blog know, graphene is a pretty attractive material to study these days due to its remarkable electrical, mechanical, and thermal properties. One of the bottlenecks to its commercialization has been the lack of a high-quality, reliable, and cheap way to produce it en masse, although chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of graphene at high temperatures (~1000^oC) on metals such as copper or nickel seems quite promising. In this approach, the graphene grows on the surface of a film of the metal, which acts as a catalyst, using carbon that is fed from some high-purity source.

In principle, though, you just need anything with carbon. An impure source could be placed on the frontside of the metal film; the carbon atoms would then diffuse to the backside of the film, forming graphene, while the impurities would stay put and later be etched away. This amusing paper from Jim Tour’s group does a nice job of highlighting this point. They use CVD to grow high-quality graphene on a copper foil using, among other things, feces from a miniature Dachsund, a cockroach leg, grass, and a short-bread flavored Girl Scout cookie. (The authors do not comment on how different flavors affect their results. I personally prefer my graphene thin-mint flavored.)

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