Evidence: Well-supported as materials taxonomy. A bag labeled “graphene” is not thereby a 2004 Manchester flake.
If one page on this site should survive a server migration, it is this one. Most arguments about graphene are arguments about which solid.
Pristine sheets
- Monolayer graphene — one honeycomb plane of sp² carbon. The object of 2004 and 1947.
- Bilayer / few-layer (FLG) — two to roughly ten planes. Electronic structure changes with layer number and stacking. Magic-angle twisted bilayer is a stacking-and-angle story (2018), not a powder grade.
- Graphite — many planes, 3D crystal. Parent material (pre-chemistry).
Chemically derived
- Graphite oxide — oxidized, lamellar graphite (Brodie lineage, before-1900).
- Graphene oxide (GO) — exfoliated oxidized sheets; hydrophilic; insulating compared with graphene; processable in water.
- Reduced graphene oxide (rGO) — GO with oxygen stripped back. More conductive than GO, more defective than cleaved or good CVD graphene.
Industrial grades (names vary by vendor)
- Nanoplatelets / GNP — stacks that may be tens of layers. Often what “tonnes of graphene” means.
- CVD film — grown on metal (Cu landmark: 2009), transferred. Grain boundaries and wrinkles are part of the object.
- Epitaxial graphene on SiC — carbon left after Si leaves the surface. IBM 100 GHz FETs used this family (2010).
- Graphene quantum dots (GQDs) — very small pieces with confined electronics and photoluminescence claims; quality varies wildly.
- Foams, aerogels, fibres, yarns — assembled architectures (e.g. wet-spun GO fibres in 2026-W38).
- Holey / perforated graphene — engineered holes; mask or membrane, not a synonym for GO (holey-graphene-molecular-stencil).
Naming collisions
- Graphene monoxide / eCOphite — company chemistry (2026-09-15-conovate-doe-award), not GO.
- “Graphene battery” in a headline may mean a conductive additive, a coating, an anode experiment, or wishful copy.
See misconceptions and glossary.