A general method of fabricating free-standing, monolayer graphene electronic device and its property characterization

We demonstrate a general process for fabricating graphene nanoelectronic devices that have next several features: free-standing, micrometer-sized monolayer graphene with high quality, arbitrarily-shaped metallic electrodes or sensors. In contrast to the normal routes, a gas etching process is used to create a deep trench in silicon for suspending the whole graphene device in a much larger area. User-designed electrodes or sensors are fabricated on the suspended graphene at the same time for realizing multiple functions. In this work, a suspended gold nanofilm sensor is designed to measure the intrinsic electrical and thermal properties of graphene on site. The sensor serves as both electrode and precise resistance thermometer at the same time. By simply changing the metallic electrode shape and electrical circuit, the free-standing graphene can be made into different devices, such as single-molecule detector or nano-resonator. In order to test the robustness of graphene device, a high electrical current is applied to heat the graphene in vacuum until it breaks. The breakdown current density is measured to be 1.86 mA/μm. More importantly, this method is not only limited to graphene, but also can be applied to any other two-dimensional materials.