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Periodic ripples on thermally-annealed graphene on Cu (110)-reconstruction or moiré pattern?

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

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Abstract

We have used ultrahigh vacuum scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) to investigate the effect of thermal annealing of graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition on a Cu(110) foil. We show that the annealing appears to induce a reconstruction of the Cu surface along the [210] direction, with a period of 1.43 nm. Such reconstructions have been ascribed to the tensile strain induced in the Cu surface by its differential thermal expansion relative to the graphene over-layer, but we show that it is in fact a moiré pattern due to interference between the graphene and the underlying atomic lattice as evidenced by the appearance of an odd-even transition only observed due to misorientation of the top layer of a layered crystal. This highlights that the analysis of STM measurements of graphene on metal surfaces should take such interference effects into account and that the graphene-Cu interface is more complex than previously thought.

Description

Keywords

graphene, scanning tunneling microscopy, reconstruction

Journal Title

Nanotechnology

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0957-4484
1361-6528

Volume Title

29

Publisher

IOP Publishing