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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2020 Nov 7.
Published in final edited form as: J Mater Chem B. 2019 Jul 10;7(41):6293–6309. doi: 10.1039/c9tb01006h

Table 2.

Recommended nomenclature for 2D carbon materials, reproduced from31

Term Definition
Graphene A single-atom-thick sheet of hexagonally arranged, sp2-bonded carbon atoms that is not an integral part of a carbon material, but is freely suspended or adhered on a foreign substrate.
Multi-layer graphene
(MLG)
A 2D (sheet-like) material, either as a free-standing flake or substrate-bound coating, consisting of a small number (between 2 and about 10) of well-defined, countable, stacked graphene layers of extended lateral dimension.
Graphene nanosheet A single-atom-thick sheet of hexagonally arranged, sp2-bonded carbon atoms that is not an integral part of a carbon material, but is freely suspended or adhered on a foreign substrate and has a lateral dimension less than 100 nm
Graphene oxide (GO) Chemically modified graphene prepared by oxidation and exfoliation that is accompanied by extensive oxidative modification of the basal plane. Graphene oxide is a monolayer material with a high oxygen content, typically characterized by C/O atomic ratios less than 3.0 and typically closer to 2.0.
Reduced graphene oxide (rGO) Graphene oxide (as above) that has been reductively processed by chemical, thermal, microwave, photo-chemical, photo-thermal or microbial/bacterial methods to reduce its oxygen content.