Article abstract
Nature Materials 6, 770 - 775 (2007)
Published online: 9 September 2007 | doi:10.1038/nmat2003
There is a Corrigendum (November 2007) associated with this Article.
Subject Categories: Electronic materials | Semiconductors | Surface and thin films
Substrate-induced bandgap opening in epitaxial graphene
S. Y. Zhou1,2, G.-H. Gweon1,7, A. V. Fedorov3, P. N. First4, W. A. de Heer4, D.-H. Lee1, F. Guinea5, A. H. Castro Neto6 & A. Lanzara1,2
Abstract
Graphene has shown great application potential as the host material for next-generation electronic devices. However, despite its intriguing properties, one of the biggest hurdles for graphene to be useful as an electronic material is the lack of an energy gap in its electronic spectra. This, for example, prevents the use of graphene in making transistors. Although several proposals have been made to open a gap in graphene's electronic spectra, they all require complex engineering of the graphene layer. Here, we show that when graphene is epitaxially grown on SiC substrate, a gap of 
0.26 eV is produced. This gap decreases as the sample thickness increases and eventually approaches zero when the number of layers exceeds four. We propose that the origin of this gap is the breaking of sublattice symmetry owing to the graphene–substrate interaction. We believe that our results highlight a promising direction for bandgap engineering of graphene.
- Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
- Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
- Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
- School of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0430, USA
- Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid, CSIC, Cantoblanco, E-28049 Madrid, Spain
- Department of Physics, Boston University, 590 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA
- Present address: Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA
Correspondence to: A. Lanzara1,2 e-mail: Alanzara@lbl.gov
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