Chemical Modification of Graphene for COVID-19 Detection and Catalysis

Due to numerous outstanding properties, graphene has been called “the wonder material”. For example, the delocalized electrons in graphene are massless and transport at virtually the speed of light, which means that graphene-based transistors have the potential to be faster than the current silicon-based transistors by thousands of times. Similarly, the potential for breakthroughs of graphene can also be found in many other fields such as energy storage, sensors, electronics, coatings, thermal applications, and mechanical strength. Even though graphene is already used in some industries, its full potential is still very far from being reached. This dissertation focuses on the applications of graphene enabled by the surface chemical modification. The main objectives of this work are: (1) to understand the chemistry of graphene and discover a new unusual type of graphene functionalization in addition to covalent and non-covalent methods (2) to utilize graphene as a transducer for biomedical devices owing to its two-dimensional confinement of sp2 -hybridized carbon atoms with an overlapping electron cloud, strong electron−phonon coupling, and a high quantum capacitance (3) to reduce carbon dioxide via graphene functionalized with single-atom chromium in the effort to solve greenhouse and climate change problems (4) to study graphene and its derivatives’ properties in the presence of defects.