2013 Theses Doctoral

Chemical Vapor Deposition Grown Pristine and Chemically Doped Monolayer Graphene

Zhao, Liuyan

Chemical vapor deposition growth has been a popular technique to produce large-area, high-quality monolayer graphene on Cu substrates ever since its first demonstration in 2009. Pristine graphene grown in such a way owns the natures of zero charge carriers and zero band gap. As an analogy to semi-conductor studies, substitutional doping with foreign atoms is a powerful way to tailor the electronic properties of this host materials. Within such a context, this thesis focuses on growing and characterizing both pristine and chemically-doped CVD grown monolayer graphene films at microscopic scales. We first synthesized pristine graphene on Cu single crystals in ultra-high-vacuum and subsequently characterized their properties by scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/S), to learn the effects of Cu substrate crystallinity on the quality of graphene growth and understand the interactions between graphene films and Cu substrates. In the subsequent chapters, we chemically doped graphene with nitrogen (N) and boron (B) atoms, and characterized their topographic and electronic structures via STM/S. We found that both N and B dopants substitionally dope graphene films, and contribute electron and hole carriers, respectively, into graphene at a rate of approximately 0.5 carrier/dopant. Apart from this, we have made comparisons between N- and B-doped graphene films in aspects of topographic features, dopant distribution and electronic perturbations. In the last part of this thesis, we used Raman spectroscopy mapping to investigate the N dopant distribution within and across structural grains. Future experiments are also brief discussed at the end of the thesis.