To-Pack or Not-to-Pack: Towards Improved Graphite Electrochemical Oxidation Through Electrode Design.

Fabrication of batch-wise efficient, user- and environmentally-friendly, and well-defined yield methods for the synthesis of graphite oxide, the main precursor to graphene oxide and its reduced derivative, is an essential and robust research field, yet is sparingly investigated or innovated in recent years. This concept review showcases recent potential advances in the fabrication of electrochemical electrodes that meet aforementioned design parameters, wherein working electrode construction is seen to play a key role in shaping the yield characteristics and aiding the mechanistic understanding of efficiency of adopted methods. Particularly, those advances pave the way for new and various tunable design parameters by fabricating different methods of encapsulating graphite powder instead of using conventional bare monolith forms of graphite as working electrode.

Electrochemical Exfoliation of Graphene Oxide: Unveiling Structural Properties and Electrochemical Performance.

An electrochemical exfoliation method for the production of graphene oxide and its characterization by electrochemical techniques are presented here. Graphite rods are used as working electrode in a three-electrode electrochemical cell, and electro-exfoliation is achieved by applying anodic polarization in a sulfuric acid solution. The electrochemical process involved two steps characterized by an intercalation at lower potential and an exfoliation at higher potential.

Resolving Dirac electrons with broadband high-resolution NMR.

Detecting the metallic Dirac electronic states on the surface of Topological Insulators (TIs) is critical for the study of important surface quantum properties (SQPs), such as Majorana zero modes, where simultaneous probing of the bulk and edge electron states is required. However, there is a particular shortage of experimental methods, showing at atomic resolution how Dirac electrons extend and interact with the bulk interior of nanoscaled TI systems. Herein, by applying advanced broadband solid-state Te nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methods on BiTe nanoplatelets, we succeeded in uncovering the hitherto invisible NMR signals with magnetic shielding that is influenced by the Dirac electrons, and we subsequently showed how the Dirac electrons spread inside the nanoplatelets.