Abstract
Chemical vapor deposition of graphene on Cu foil was performed to clarify the origin of the characteristic domain structure within individual graphene islands grown on variously oriented Cu grain surfaces. While the domain structure strongly affected island shapes on Cu(111) and (101), islands grown on Cu(001) showed that they always had a four-lobed shape regardless of whether they consisted of a single domain or multiple domains. The formation of the specific shape is related to the fact that there are edges in two fast growth directions that were found to have equivalent atomic configurations for the oriented domain. Furthermore, hydrogen etching was found to preferentially act to misoriented domains within the island on Cu(001), leading to single-crystalline four-lobed island formation. Finally, we found an interesting feature in that the ratio of single-crystalline islands increased on the vicinal Cu(001) surface compared with that on the Cu(001) basal plane. Cu(111) microfacets existing on the vicinal surface may play a significant role in the nucleation stage. These findings shed new light on the graphene growth mechanism on Cu surface and may lead the way to enlarging the domain size in the complete graphene layer by means of precise control of the “intra-island” domain structures.
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