All carbon electronics based on graphene has been an elusive goal. For more than a decade, the inability to produce significant band-gaps in this material has prevented the development of semiconducting graphene. While chemical functionalization was thought to be a route to semiconducting graphene, disorder in the chemical adsorbates, leading to low mobilities, have proved to be a hurdle in its production. We demonstrate a new approach to produce semiconducting graphene that uses a small concentration of covalently bonded surface nitrogen, not as a means to functionalize graphene, but instead as a way to constrain and bend graphene. We demonstrate that a submonolayer concentration of nitrogen on SiC is sufficient to pin epitaxial graphene to the SiC interface as it grows, causing the graphene to buckle. The resulting 3-dimensional modulation of the graphene opens a band-gap greater than 0.7eV in the otherwise continuous metallic graphene sheet.
@article{arxiv.1306.3196,
title = {Wide-Gap Semiconducting Graphene from Nitrogen-Seeded SiC},
author = {Feng Wang and Gang Liu and Sara Rothwell and Meredith Nevius and Antonio Tejeda and Amina Taleb-Ibrahimi and Leonard Feldman and Philip Cohen and Edward Conrad},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1306.3196},
year = {2014}
}