Dear PUSPM community,
There will be a PUSPM seminar this Friday, September 11th, in Birck 2001 given by Michael Bolen on "Graphene formation mechanisms on 4H-SiC." Pizza will be provided at 11:30 a.m., the talk will begin at 12:00 and end by 1:00 p.m.. See the below abstract for more details on the talk. I hope to see you there.
Ryan Wagner PUSPM student coordinator
Abstract:
Research on graphene has exploded in the past few years given the profound possibilities it possesses to revolutionize the semiconductor industry. There are many techniques being explored to create a reproducible and uniform graphene layer for electronic devices, one of which is through the thermal decomposition of silicon carbide. The creation of graphite through this method has been known for over 30 years, but the formation mechanisms at the microscopic level have not been thoroughly explored. In this talk, graphene formation on both the Si- and C-face of 4H-SiC is explored primarily through the use of atomic force microscopy (AFM). A hot-walled chemical vapor deposition system is used to vary the graphene synthesizing conditions and the resultant morphologies are measured ex-situ. Small changes in growth conditions are found to cause severe morphological changes to each polar surface which are captured through scanning probe microscopy. Height and phase data gathered from AFM depict how graphene spreads over the 4H-SiC surface. Data from scanning tunneling microscopy is used to confirm the presence of graphene and corroborate the AFM data.