Nanospectroscopy highlights

This study reports on a novel approach to determine the relationship between the corrugation and the thermal stability of epitaxial graphene grown on a strongly interacting substrate. According to density functional theory calculations, the C single layer grown on Re(0001) is strongly corrugated, with a buckling of 1.6 Å, yielding a simulated C 1s core level spectrum which is in excellent agreement with the experimental one. We found that corrugation is closely knit with the thermal stability of the C network: C-C bond breaking is favored in the strongly buckled regions of the moiré cell, though it requires the presence of diffusing graphene layer vacancies. Our data shows that there is a close relationship between graphene corrugation and

graphene corrugation and its thermal stability, a key achievement in sight of the potential high temperature applications of supported graphene.

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Thermal Stability of corrugated epitaxial graphene grown on Re(0001);
E. Miniussi, M. Pozzo, A. Baraldi, E. Vesselli, R. R. Zhan, G. Comelli, T.O. Menteş, M.Á. Niño, A. Locatelli, S. Lizzit, and D. Alfè;
Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 216101 (2011);
doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.216101.