The degree of oxidation of graphene oxide

Abstract

We show that the degree of oxidation of graphene oxide (GO) can be obtained by using a combination of state-of-the-art ab initio computational modeling and X-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS). We show that the shift of the XPS C1s peak relative to pristine graphene, ∆EC1s, can be described with high accuracy by ∆EC1s = A(cO − cl )2 + E0, where c0 is the oxygen concentration, A = 52.3 eV, cl = 0.122, and E0 = 1.22 eV. Our results demonstrate a precise determination of the oxygen content of GO samples.