Author(s)

Igor Levchenko¹, Jinghua Fang², Kostya (Ken) Ostrikov^1,3,4, Ludovico Lorello⁵, Michael Keidar⁶

¹School of Chemistry, Physics, and Mechanical Engineering, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.
²School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, Australia.
³Joint CSIRO—QUT Sustainable Materials and Devices Laboratory, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Lindfield, Australia.
⁴Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences (BNLMS), College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China.
⁵Materials Science Department, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy.
⁶George Washington University, Washington DC, USA.

Two Minkowski functionals were tested in the capacity of morphological descriptors to quantitatively compare the arrays of vertically-aligned graphene flakes grown on smooth and nanoporous alumina and silica surfaces. Specifically, the Euler-Poincaré characteristic and fractal dimension graphs were used to characterize the degree of connectivity and order in the systems, i.e. in the graphene flake patterns of petal-like and tree-like morphologies on solid substrates, and meshlike patterns (networks) grown on nanoporous alumina treated in low-temperature inductivelycoupled plasma. It was found that the Minkowski functionals return higher connectivity and fractal dimension numbers for the graphene flakepatterns with more complex morphologies, and indeed can be used as morphological descriptors to differentiate among various configurations of vertically-aligned graphene flakes grown on surfaces.

Graphene Flakes, Minkowski Functionals, Euler-Poincaré Characteristic, Connectivity

Levchenko, I., Fang, J.H., Ostrikov, K., Lorello, L. and Keidar, M. (2016) Morphological Characterization of Graphene Flake Networks Using Minkowski Functionals. Graphene, 5, 25-34. doi: 10.4236/graphene.2016.51003.