Graphene can be made by crashing buckyballs into surfaces

MIT Technology Review : Graphene, the single-atom-thick carbon molecule, is hard to make for many of the applications that researchers would like to use it in. Now Simone Taioli of the Trento Institute for Fundamental Physics and Applications in Italy and his colleagues say they’ve developed a successful method for depositing graphene onto substrates for use in electronics. The technique uses the 60-atom carbon molecule known as buckminsterfullerene—or buckyball. The buckyballs are shot at a sheet of copper at supersonic speeds. The impact causes them to break open and then stick to the surface, creating a graphene film. The technique is a proof of concept at this point, but it produces relatively high quality films and incorporates the pentagonal shapes of the buckyball structure that could serve as bandgaps, which have been hard to create in graphene.