Examination of humidity effects on measured thickness and interfacial phenomena of exfoliated graphene on silicon dioxide via amplitude modulation atomic force microscopy

Abstract

The properties of Few-Layer Graphene (FLG) change with the number of layers and Amplitude Modulation (AM) Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) is commonly used to determine the thickness of FLG. However, AFM measurements have been shown to be sensitive to environmental conditions such as relative humidity (RH). In the present study, AM-AFM is used to measure the thickness and loss tangent of exfoliated graphene on silicon dioxide (SiO2) as RH is increased from 10% to 80%. We show that the measured thickness of graphene is dependent on RH. The loss tangent values of the graphene and oxide regions are both affected by humidity, with generally higher loss tangent for graphene than SiO2. As RH increases, we observe the loss tangent of both materials approaches the same value. We hypothesize that there is a layer of water trapped between the graphene and SiO2 substrate to explain this observation. Using this interpretation, the loss tangent images also indicate movement and change in this trapped water layer as RH increases, which impacts the measured thickness of graphene using AM-AFM.