Hydrogen assisted growth of high quality epitaxial graphene on the C-face of 4H-SiC

Abstract

We demonstrate hydrogen assisted growth of high quality epitaxial graphene on the C-face of 4H-SiC. Compared with the conventional thermal decomposition technique, the size of the growth domain by this method is substantially increased and the thickness variation is reduced. Based on the morphology of epitaxial graphene, the role of hydrogen is revealed. It is found that hydrogen acts as a carbon etchant. It suppresses the defect formation and nucleation of graphene. It also improves the kinetics of carbon atoms via hydrocarbon species. These effects lead to increase of the domain size and the structure quality. The consequent capping effect results in smooth surface morphology and suppression of multilayer growth. Our method provides a viable route to fine tune the growth kinetics of epitaxial graphene on SiC.

arXiv comment9 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Energy gaps of atomically precise armchair graphene nanoribbons
• Atomic resolution imaging of the two-component Dirac-Landau levels in a gapped graphene monolayer
• Imaging the dynamics of individual hydrogen atom intercalated between two graphene sheets
• Scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy of nanoscale twisted bilayer graphene
• Epigraphene : epitaxial graphene on silicon carbide