Epitaxial Growth of Graphene on Single-Crystal Cu(111) Wafers

The epitaxial growth of graphene via chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of an acetone/argon mixture on freestanding single-crystal Cu(111) wafers offers the possibility to produce large-scale graphene of nearly uniform orientation. These Cu(111) substrates excel by their excellent single crystal structural quality (minimum mosaic spread of 0.034°, fraction of crystal volume with twin orientation − 4 ) and can be scaled up to any size (only restricted by the available sizes of Si(111) wafers). The growth of graphene can be monitored by using a large variety of complementary standard techniques as typically used in surface science experiments. The formation of graphene is characterized in terms of its chemical composition (via X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, XPS), its film thickness (via XPS and via X-ray photoelectron diffraction, XPD), its surface structure (via low energy electron diffraction, LEED, and via scanning tunneling microscopy, STM), and its Fermi surface (via Fermi surface mapping, FSM, as representing a branch of angular resolved ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy, ARUPS). It is observed that the graphene coating exhibits a thickness of about a monolayer with the majority of the graphene domains (~ 89%) being rotated only by ± 1.65° with respect to the Cu(111) surface lattice.