Graphite is one of the most chemically inert materials. Its elementary constituent, monolayer graphene, is generally expected to inherit most of the parent material's properties including chemical inertness. Here we show that, unlike graphite, defect-free monolayer graphene exhibits a strong activity with respect to splitting molecular hydrogen, which is comparable to that of metallic and other known catalysts for this reaction. We attribute the unexpected catalytic activity to surface corrugations (nanoscale ripples), a conclusion supported by theory. Nanoripples are likely to play a role in other chemical reactions involving graphene and, because nanorippling is inherent to atomically thin crystals, can be important for two dimensional materials in general.
@article{arxiv.2303.08001,
title = {Unexpected catalytic activity of nanorippled graphene},
author = {P. Z. Sun and W. Q. Xiong and A. Bera and I. Timokhin and Z. F. Wu and A. Mishchenko and M. C. Sellers and B. L. Liu and H. M. Cheng and E. Janzen and J. H. Edgar and I. V. Grigorieva and S. J. Yuan and A. K. Geim},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.08001},
year = {2023}
}