Superior Thermal Conductivity of Single-Layer Graphene Alexander A. Balandin,* ,†,‡ Suchismita Ghosh, † Wenzhong Bao, § Irene Calizo, † Desalegne Teweldebrhan, † Feng Miao, § and Chun Ning Lau § Nano-DeVice Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering, UniVersity of California-RiVerside, RiVerside, California 92521, Materials Science and Engineering Program, Bourns College of Engineering, UniVersity of California-RiVerside, RiVerside, California 92521, Department of Physics and Astronomy, UniVersity of California-RiVerside, RiVerside, California 92521 Received December 5, 2007; Revised Manuscript Received January 15, 2008 ABSTRACT We report the measurement of the thermal conductivity of a suspended single-layer graphene. The room temperature values of the thermal conductivity in the range ∼(4.84 ( 0.44) × 10 3 to (5.30 ( 0.48) × 10 3 W/mK were extracted for a single-layer graphene from the dependence of the Raman G peak frequency on the excitation laser power and independently measured G peak temperature coefficient. The extremely high value of the thermal conductivity suggests that graphene can outperform carbon nanotubes in heat conduction. The superb thermal conduction property of graphene is beneficial for the proposed electronic applications and establishes graphene as an excellent material for thermal management. Graphene, a recently discovered form of carbon 1 that consists of only one plain layer of atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice, exhibits a number of intriguing properties. 1–8 The unusual energy dispersion relation, the low-lying electrons in single-layer graphene behave like massless relativistic Dirac fermions, gives rise to unique phenomena such as quantum spin Hall effect, 2,3 enhanced Coulomb interaction, 3–5 suppression of the weak localization, 6 and deviation from the adiabatic Born–Oppenheimer approximation. 7 Its ex- traordinary high room temperature (RT) carrier mobility, 1,8 conductance quantization 5 possibilities of inducing a band gap through the lateral quantum confinement, 8 and prospects for epitaxial growth 9 make graphene a promising material for future electronic circuits. Despite theoretical suggestions that graphene may also have unusually high thermal con- ductivity, 10–12 no measurements were reported to date to support this claim. In this letter, we report the first experimental investigation of thermal conduction in a suspended single-layer graphene performed with the help of confocal micro-Raman spectros- copy. The room temperature values of the thermal conduc- tivity of up to 5300 W/mK were extracted for a single-layer graphene from the dependence of the Raman G peak frequency on the excitation laser power. The extremely high values of the thermal conductivity suggest that graphene can outperform carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in heat conduction. The superb thermally conducting property of graphene is ben- eficial for the proposed electronic applications and establishes graphene as an excellent material for thermal management. The discovered outstanding thermal properties of graphene provide an extra motivation for graphene integration with the nanometer-scale silicon complementary metal-oxide- semiconductor (CMOS) technology as well as beyond- CMOS devices and circuits. Furthermore, it increases the range of graphene applications as the thermal management material in optoelectronics, photonics, and bioengineering. With the continuously decreasing size of electronic devices and increasing dissipation power density in downscaled circuits, one observes a tremendous growth of importance of materials that can conduct heat efficiently. CNTs are known to have very high thermal conductivity 13,14 K with the experimentally determined RT value K ≈ 3000 W/mK for an individual multiwall carbon nanotube (MW-CNT) 15 and K ≈ 3500 W/mK for an individual single-wall carbon nanotube (SW-CNT). 16 The RT thermal conductivity in the range 1750-5800 W/mK was reported for the crystalline “ropes” of SW-CNTs. 17 These values exceed those of the best bulk crystalline thermal conductor, diamond, which has the thermal conductivity in the range K ) 1000–2200 W/mK. 18 Theoretical calculations of the thermal conductivity * Corresponding author. E-mail: balandin@ee.ucr.edu. Web address: http://ndl.ee.ucr.edu. † Nano-Device Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering, Uni- versity of California-Riverside. ‡ Materials Science and Engineering Program, Bourns College of Engineering, University of California-Riverside. § Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California- Riverside. NANO LETTERS 2008 Vol. 8, No. 3 902-907 10.1021/nl0731872 CCC: $40.75  2008 American Chemical Society Published on Web 02/20/2008