Structures of fluorinated graphene and their signatures

Abstract

Recent synthesis of fluorinated graphene introduced interesting stable derivatives of graphene. In particular, fluorographene (CF), namely, fully fluorinated chair conformation, is found to display crucial features, such as high mechanical strength, charged surfaces, local magnetic moments due to vacancy defects, and a wide band gap rapidly reducing with uniform strain. These properties, as well as structural parameters and electronic densities of states, are found to scale with fluorine coverage. However, most of the experimental data reported to date neither for CF nor for other CnF structures complies with the results obtained from first-principles calculations. In this study, we attempt to clarify the sources of disagreements. © 2011 American Physical Society.