Slip‐Line‐Guided Growth of Graphene
Yanglizhi Li, Haiyang Liu, Zhenghua Chang, Haoxiang Li, Shenxing Wang, Li Lin, Hailin Peng, Yujie Wei, Luzhao Sun, Zhongfan Liu
Abstract
Manipulating the crystal orientation of emerging 2D materials via chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is a key premise for obtaining single-crystalline films and designing specific grain-boundary (GB) structures. Herein, the controllable crystal orientation of graphene during the CVD process is demonstrated on a single-crystal metal surface with preexisting atomic-scale stair steps resulting from dislocation slip lines. The slip-line-guided growth principle is established to explain and predict the crystal orientation distribution of graphene on a variety of metal facets, especially for the multidirectional growth cases on Cu(hk0) and Cu(hkl) substrates. Not only large-area single-crystal graphene, but also bicrystal graphene with controllable GB misorientations, are successfully synthesized by rationally employing tailored metal substrate facets. As a demonstration, bicrystal graphenes with misorientations of ≈21° and ≈11° are constructed on Cu(410) and Cu(430) foils, respectively. This guideline builds a bridge linking the crystal orientation of graphene and the substrate facet, thereby opening a new avenue for constructing bicrystals with the desired GB structures or manipulating 2D superlattice twist angles in a bottom-up manner.