Selective fabrication of free-standing ABA and ABC trilayer graphene with/without Dirac-cone energy bands

摘要

Strict control of temperature and pressure during annealing is shown to be crucial for controllably stacking graphene by a team in Japan. Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms in a hexagonal arrangement. When two graphene layers are stacked, some carbon atoms in the top layer sit above the center of each hexagon of the lower layer. A third layer either sits directly aligned with the bottom layer (ABA stacking) or is again displaced from the previous two (ABC stacking). These two arrangements exhibit very different properties. Takashi Takahashi from Tohoku University and colleagues deterministically created either ABA or ABC trilayer graphene by first annealing bilayer graphene on a hydrogen-terminated silicon carbide substrate. They found that the alignment of the third layer is determined by the temperature and pressure of this anneal.