Organic Covalent Patterning of Nanostructured Graphene with Selectivity at the Atomic Level

• Published in: Nano letters Vol. 16; no. 1; pp. 355 - 361
• Main Authors: Navarro, Juan Jesús, Leret, Sofía, Calleja, Fabián, Stradi, Daniele, Black, Andrés, Bernardo-Gavito, Ramón, Garnica, Manuela, Granados, Daniel, Vázquez de Parga, Amadeo L, Pérez, Emilio M, Miranda, Rodolfo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Chemical Society 13.01.2016
• Subjects: Nanostructured graphene; chemical functionalization; epitaxial graphene; scanning tunneling microscopy
• ISSN: 1530-6984; 1530-6992
• DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b03928

Organic covalent functionalization of graphene with long-range periodicity is highly desirableit is anticipated to provide control over its electronic, optical, or magnetic propertiesand remarkably challenging. In this work we describe a method for the covalent modification of graphene with strict spatial periodicity at the nanometer scale. The periodic landscape is provided by a single monolayer of graphene grown on Ru(0001) that presents a moiré pattern due to the mismatch between the carbon and ruthenium hexagonal lattices. The moiré contains periodically arranged areas where the graphene–ruthenium interaction is enhanced and shows higher chemical reactivity. This phenomenon is demonstrated by the attachment of cyanomethyl radicals (CH2CN•) produced by homolytic breaking of acetonitrile (CH3CN), which is shown to present a nearly complete selectivity (>98%) binding covalently to graphene on specific atomic sites. This method can be extended to other organic nitriles, paving the way for the attachment of functional molecules.