Chlorine-based non-covalent graphene analog on Cu(111)

Abstract

Advanced fabrication of specific graphene analogs on surfaces will facilitate the exploitation of unexplored physical properties that may enrich their potential applications in the future, and the quest for graphene analogs has expanded from covalent graphene analogs to non-covalent ones. Previously, artificial non-covalent molecular graphene has been assembled by atomic manipulation, which, however, is a technical challenge and extremely limits the creation of non-covalent graphene analogs over a large area. Herein, we achieve the fabrication of a chlorine(Cl)-based non-covalent graphene analog stabilized by copper(Cu) adatoms on Cu(111) through an easy-to-facilitate self-assembly approach, as demonstrated by the combination of scanning tunneling microscopy imaging and density functional theory calculations. Moreover, the Cu adatoms are found to uniformly distribute within such a non-covalent graphene analog, which is inaccessible for covalent ones and shows potential for stabilizing the non-covalent graphene analog as well as modulating its overall electronic properties. Such findings exemplify the construction of non-covalent graphene analogs with a large area by a more effective self-assembled approach in contrast to the previous atomic manipulation method.