Shear exfoliation in liquids : a promising way to produce graphene.

My initial project was to install and test a new spectrometer for the solid state physics group. However, due to a delay in the construction of the new photoluminescence laboratory this project had to be abandoned. Graphene is a one atom thick 2D material that presents remarkable physical properties whose applications are very promising. However, the current means of production present several limitations. They are costly in terms of energy consumption and yields are ridiculously low. Thus, to progress from the laboratory to industrial production it will be necessary to find a method to produce large quantities of defect graphene. In April 2014, a paper \cite{graphene_shear} came out in \emph{Nature Material} demonstrating that shear exfoliation in liquids would be a scalable way to produce defect-free grahene. The aim of my project was to test this new method by trying to reproduce some of the results published in this article. It involved the setting up of the experiment, the production of samples and finally their characterisation.