Periodic ripples on thermally-annealed Graphene on Cu (110) – reconstruction or Moiré pattern?
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Abstract
We have used Ultrahigh Vacuum (UHV) Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) to investigate the effect of thermal annealing of graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) 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 mis-orientation 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.