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, 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.
@article{arxiv.1901.02131,
title = {Chemically Induced Transformation of CVD-Grown Bilayer Graphene into Single Layer Diamond},
author = {Pavel V. Bakharev and Ming Huang and Manav Saxena and Suk Woo Lee and Se Hun Joo and Sung O Park and Jichen Dong and Dulce Camacho-Mojica and Sunghwan Jin and Youngwoo Kwon and Mandakini Biswal and Feng Ding and Sang Kyu Kwak and Zonghoon Lee and Rodney S. Ruoff},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.02131},
year = {2020}
}