Graphene, the 2D form of carbon based material existing as a single layer of atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice, has set the science and technology sectors alight with interest in the last decade in view of its astounding electrical and thermal properties, combined with its mechanical stiffness, strength and elasticity. Two distinct strategies have been undertaken for graphene production, i.e. the bottom-up and the top-down. The former relies on the generation of graphene from suitably designed molecular building blocks undergoing chemical reaction to form covalently linked 2D networks. The latter occurs via exfoliation of graphite into graphene. Bottom-up techniques, based on the organic syntheses starting from small molecular modules, when performed in liquid media, are both size limited, because macromolecules become more and more insoluble with increasing size, and suffer from the occurrence of side reactions with increasing molecular weight. Because of these reasons such a synthesis has been performed more and more on a solid (ideally catalytically active) surface. Substrate-based growth of single layers can be done also by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) or via reduction of silicon carbide, which unfortunately relies on the ability to follow a narrow thermodynamic path. Top-down approaches can be accomplished under different environmental conditions. Alongside the mechanical cleavage based on the scotch tape approach, liquid-phase exfoliation (LPE) methods are becoming more and more interesting because they are extremely versatile, potentially up-scalable, and can be used to deposit graphene in a variety of environments and on different substrates not available using mechanical cleavage or growth methods. Interestingly, LPE can be applied to produce different layered systems exhibiting different compositions such as BN, MoS2, WS2, NbSe2, and TaS2, thereby enabling the tuning of numerous physico-chemical properties of the material. Furthermore, LPE can be employed to produce graphene-based composites or films, which are key components for many applications, such as thin-film transistors, conductive transparent electrodes for indium tin oxide replacement, e.g. in light-emitting diodes, or photovoltaics. In this review, we highlight the recent progress that has led to successful production of high quality graphene by means of LPE of graphite. In particular, we discuss the mechanisms of exfoliation and methods that are employed for graphene characterization. We then describe a variety of successful liquid-phase exfoliation methods by categorizing them into two major classes, i.e. surfactant-free and surfactant-assisted LPE. Furthermore, exfoliation in aqueous and organic solutions is presented and discussed separately.

Organic semiconductors have generated considerable interest for their potential for creating inexpensive and flexible devices easily processed on a large scale [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. However technological applications are currently limited by the low mobility of the charge carriers associated with the disorder in these materials [5][6][7][8]. Much effort over the past decades has therefore been focused on optimizing the organisation of the material or the devices to improve carrier mobility. Here we take a radically different path to solving this problem, namely by injecting carriers into states that are hybridized to the vacuum electromagnetic field. These are coherent states that can extend over as many as 10 5 molecules and should thereby favour conductivity in such materials. To test this idea, organic semiconductors were strongly coupled to the vacuum electromagnetic field on plasmonic structures to form polaritonic states with large Rabi splittings ∼ 0.7 eV. Conductivity experiments show that indeed the current does increase by an order of magnitude at resonance in the coupled state, reflecting mostly a change in field-effect mobility as revealed when the structure is gated in a transistor configuration. A theoretical quantum model is presented that confirms the delocalization of the wave-functions of the hybridized states and the consequences on the conductivity. While this is a proof-of-principle study, in practice conductivity mediated by light-matter hybridized states is easy to implement and we therefore expect that it will be used to improve organic devices. More broadly our findings illustrate the potential of engineering the vacuum electromagnetic environment to modify and to improve properties of materials.Light and matter can enter into the strong coupling regime by exchanging photons faster than any competing dissipation processes. This is normally achieved by placing the material in a confined electromagnetic environment, such as a Fabry-Perot (FP) cavity composed of two parallel mirrors that is resonant with an electronic transition in the material. Alternatively, one can use surface plasmon resonances as in this study. Strong coupling leads to the formation of two hybridized light-matter polaritonic states, P+ and P-, separated by the so-called Rabi splitting, as illustrated in Figure 1a. According to quantum electrodynamics, in the absence of dissipation, the Rabi splitting for a single molecule is given bywhere ω is the cavity resonance or transition energy ( the reduced Planck constant), 0 the vacuum permittivity, v the mode volume, d the transition dipole moment of the material and n ph the number of photons present in the system. The last term implies that, even in the dark, the Rabi splitting has a finite value which is due to the interaction with the vacuum electromagnetic field. This vacuum Rabi splitting can be further increased by coupling a large number N of oscillators to the electromagnetic mode since Ω N R ∝ √ N [12]. In this ensemble coupling, in addition to P+ an...

During the last decade, two-dimensional materials (2DMs) have attracted great attention due to their unique chemical and physical properties, which make them appealing platforms for diverse applications in opto-electronic devices, energy generation and storage, and sensing. Among their various extraordinary properties, 2DMs possess high surface area-to-volume ratios and ultra-high surface sensitivity to the environment, which are key characteristics for applications in chemical sensing. Furthermore, 2DMs' superior electrical and optical properties, combined with their excellent mechanical characteristics such as robustness and flexibility, make these materials ideal components for the fabrication of a new generation of high-performance chemical sensors. Depending on the specific device, 2DMs can be tailored to interact with various chemical species at the non-covalent level, making them powerful platforms for fabricating devices exhibiting a high sensitivity towards detection of various analytes including gases, ions and small biomolecules. Here, we will review the most enlightening recent advances in the field of chemical sensors based on atomically-thin 2DMs and we will discuss the opportunities and the challenges towards the realization of novel hybrid materials and sensing devices.