English

Competing scanning tunneling microscope tip-interlayer interactions for twisted multilayer graphene on the a-plane SiC surface

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2015-06-23 v1 Materials Science

Abstract

Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) images are obtained for the first time on few layer and twisted multilayer epitaxial graphene states synthesized on n+ 6H-SiC a-plane non-polar surface. The twisted graphene is determined to have a rotation angle of 5.4{\deg} between the top two layers, by comparing moir\'e patterns from stick and ball models of bilayer graphene to experimentally obtained images. Furthermore, the experimental moir\'e pattern shows dynamic behavior, continuously shuffling between two stable surface arrangements one bond length apart. The moir\'e pattern shifts by more than 1 nm, making it easy to observe with STM. Explanation of this dynamic behavior is attributed to electrostatic interactions between the STM tip and the graphene sample.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1501.04872,
  title  = {Competing scanning tunneling microscope tip-interlayer interactions for twisted multilayer graphene on the a-plane SiC surface},
  author = {P. Xu and M. L. Ackerman and S. D. Barber and J. K. Schoelz and P. M. Thibado and V. D. Wheeler and L. O. Nyakiti and R. L. Myers-Ward and C. R. Eddy and D. K. Gaskill},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.04872},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

20 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T08:07:18.321Z