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.