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Updated: Dec 12, 2025
Fabrication of Gate-tunable Graphene Devices for Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Studies with Coulomb Impurities
Published on: July 24, 2015
Imaging the reactivity and width of graphene's boundary region
Huda S AlSalem1, Soha T Al-Goul2, Alejandro García-Miranda Ferrari3
1School of Chemistry, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK and Photon Science Institute, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK and School of Chemistry, Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Abstract:
The reactivity of graphene at its boundary region has been imaged using non-linear spectroscopy to address the controversy whether the terraces of graphene or its edges are more reactive. Graphene was functionalised with phenyl groups, and we subsequently scanned our vibrational sum-frequency generation setup from the functionalised graphene terraces across the edges. A greater phenyl signal is clearly observed at the edges, showing evidence of increased reactivity in the boundary region. We estimate an upper limit of 1 mm for the width of the CVD graphene boundary region.
