Graphene was discovered in 2004 by A. Geim and K. Novoselov who both received the Nobel prize in 2010. Soon after the discovery, the quantum Hall effect was observed in this new material. This observation has triggered a considerable interest in the metrology community and with the progress in the device fabrication, graphene was soon identified as a good candidate to possibly replace the traditional GaAs devices. The major advantage of graphene over GaAs is that it will be possible to make measurement at higher temperature (4.2 K instead of 0.3 K) and lower magnetic fields (2 T instead of 10T). This change of the operational parameters will have a profound impact on the equipment needed to perform the experiment. The whole set up will become simpler and much cheaper to operate. Several national metrology institutes are currently participating in a european scale effort to fully investigate the potential of graphene in electrical metrology.

In this project, the Nanoelectronics lab at the University of Basel and the Quantum Metrology Lab at the Federal Institute of Metrology (METAS) will join forces to investigate the potential of graphene grown by chemical vapour deposition (CVD) to meet the specific needs of metrological application which include high mobility, low contact resistance, large sample dimensions, and large critical current.