Anomalies in thickness measurements of graphene and few layer graphite crystals by tapping mode atomic force microscopy

By P. Nemes-Incze, Z. Osváth, K. Kamarás, László Péter Biró. 2008

602 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) in the tapping (intermittent contact) mode is a commonly used tool to measure the thickness of graphene and few layer graphene (FLG) flakes on silicon oxide surfaces. It is a convenient tool to quickly determine the thickness of individual FLG films. However, reports from literature show a large variation of the measured thickness of graphene layers. This paper is focused on the imaging mechanism of tapping mode AFM (TAFM) when measuring graphene and FLG thickness, and we show that at certain measurement parameters significant deviations can be introduced in the measured thickness of FLG flakes. An increase of as much as 1 nm can be observed in the measured height of FLG crystallites, when using an improperly chosen range of free amplitude values of the tapping cantilever. We present comparative Raman spectroscopy and TAFM measurements on selected single and multilayer graphene films, based on which we suggest ways to correctly measure graphene and FLG thickness using TAFM.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d602372bfe2c62598ea9546d34e099505e111b76

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

The effect of the substrate on the Raman and photoluminescence emission of single-layer MoS2 (2013, methodology): “denum disulfide (MoS 2 ) has a fairly high in-plane mobility [1, 2], a large Seebeck coefficient [3], remarkable mechanical properties [4, 5, 6] and a large and direct bandgap (single layer: 1.88 eV) [7, 8]. Thus, for optoelectronic applications, MoS 2 represents an interesting complement to graphen”
Progress, challenges, and opportunities in two-dimensional materials beyond graphene. (2013, background): “profile of a single layer, one must first optimize the tip surface distance to exclude any hysteretic artifacts.(130)”
Stability and exfoliation of germanane: a germanium graphane analogue. (2013, background): “5 Å for a single layer, since it is well known that differences in the attractive potentials between the AFM tip, the substrate, and the layered material often cause the measured AFM thickness to be larger than the expected value.(50) The weak Raman intensities of few-layer GeH, the photothermal deg”
The influence of thermal annealing to remove polymeric residue on the electronic doping and morphological characteristics of graphene (2013, methodology): “AFM was carried out in non-contact mode and care was taken to avoid tip–sample interactions caused by the free amplitude of the tip [24] [25].”