Robustness of large-area suspended graphene under interaction with intense laser
Yasuhiro Kuramitsu, T. Minami, T. Hihara, K. Sakai, T. Nishimoto, S. Isayama, Yu-Tzu Liao, Kuan-Ting Wu, Wei‐Yen Woon, S. H. Chen, Yueli Liu, Shih‐Ming He, Ching‐Yuan Su, Masato Ota, S. Egashira, A. Morace, Y. Sakawa, Y. Abe, H. Habara, R. Kodama, Leonard N. K. Döhl, N. C. Woolsey, M. Koenig, Harihara Sudhan Kumar, Naofumi Ohnishi, Masato Kanasaki, Takeshi Asai, Tomoya Yamauchi, Keiji Oda, Ko. Kondo, Hiromitsu Kiriyama, Yuji Fukuda
Abstract
Graphene is known as an atomically thin, transparent, highly electrically and thermally conductive, light-weight, and the strongest 2D material. We investigate disruptive application of graphene as a target of laser-driven ion acceleration. We develop large-area suspended graphene (LSG) and by transferring graphene layer by layer we control the thickness with precision down to a single atomic layer. Direct irradiations of the LSG targets generate MeV protons and carbons from sub-relativistic to relativistic laser intensities from low contrast to high contrast conditions without plasma mirror, evidently showing the durability of graphene.