High quality, transferrable graphene grown on single crystal Cu(111) thin films on basal-plane sapphire

The current method of growing large-area graphene on polycrystalline Cu surfaces (foils or thin films) and its transfer to arbitrary substrates is technologically attractive. However, the quality of graphene can be improved significantly by growing it on single-crystal Cu surfaces. Here we show that high quality, large-area graphene can be grown on epitaxial single-crystal Cu(111) thin films on reusable basal-plane sapphire [alpha-Al2O3(0001)] substrates for transfer to another substrate. While enabling graphene growth on Cu single-crystal surfaces, this method has the potential to avoid the high cost and extensive damage to graphene associated with sacrificing bulk single-crystal Cu during graphene transfer. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3569143]