Abstract
Understanding and engineering the properties of crystalline surfaces has been critical in achieving functional electronics at the nanoscale. Employing scanning tunneling microscopy, surface x-ray diffraction, and high-resolution x-ray reflectivity experiments, we present a thorough study of epitaxial graphene (EG)/Ge(110) and report a Ge(110) "6 × 2" reconstruction stabilized by the presence of epitaxial graphene unseen in group-IV semiconductor surfaces. X-ray studies reveal that graphene resides atop the surface reconstruction with a 0.34 nm van der Waals (vdW) gap and provides protection from ambient degradation.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 044004 |
| Journal | Physical Review Materials |
| Volume | 2 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 13 2018 |
Funding
We acknowledge support from the Northwestern University (NU) MRSEC (NSF Grant No. DMR-1121262). We acknowledge use of 33-ID at the APS (DOE Award No. DE-AC02- 06CH11357 to ANL). This work was performed, in part, at the Center for Nanoscale Materials, a US Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility, and supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. B.K., A.J.M., and M.C.H acknowledge support from the Office of Naval Research (Grant No. N00014-14-1-0669), and the NSF Graduate Fellowship DGE- 0824162 and DGE-1324585. R.M.J. and M.S.A. acknowledge support from the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences (Award No. DE-SC0016007) for graphene synthesis, and R.M.J. also acknowledges support from the Department of Defense (DOD) Air Force Office of Scientific Research through the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (No. 32 CFR 168a). Preliminary x-ray work made use of the NU X-ray Diffraction Facility supported by MRSEC (NSF Grant No. DMR- 1720139). The authors would like to thank Paul Fenter (ANL), Zhan Zhang (ANL), and Jon Emery (NU) for useful discussions and assistance with x-ray analysis.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Materials Science
- Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)