2007/09/09 by Shuyun Zhou, S. Y. Zhou, G. -H. Gweon +13 · 11 citations
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Band gap #Carbon Nanotubes in Composites #Condensed matter physics #Epitaxy #Graphene #Graphene and Nanomaterials Applications #Graphene nanoribbons #Graphene research and applications #Layer (electronics) #Materials science #Nanotechnology #Optoelectronics #Physics #Substrate (aquarium) #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.mtrl-sci #cond-mat.str-el
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/nmat2003
published as Nature Materials 6, 770-775 (2007) · 10 pages, 4 figures; updated references
openalex publication_date 2007/09/09 · arxiv created 2007/11/19 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Graphene has shown great application potentials 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 its lacking of an energy gap in the 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 the SiC substrate, a gap of ~ 0.26 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 our results highlight a promising direction for band gap engineering of graphene.