Abstract
We have performed density-functional tight-binding simulations mimicking the thermal decomposition of the SiC (0001̄) surface to reproduce the experimentally observed growth of either graphene or carbon nanotubes. A graphene-like network was obtained from a layer-by-layer decomposition of the SiC surface. The interaction between graphene and SiC was found to be relatively weak. Meanwhile, carbon nanotubes grew when a five-membered ring was initially formed together with a carbon chain. The simulation results suggest that growth selectivity depends on the overall carbon network connectivity and carbon aggregation speed at the very initial stage of the decomposition process.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 266-271 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | Chemical Physics Letters |
| Volume | 595-596 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 18 2014 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
WN and MK acknowledge partial support by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas ‘Science of Atomic Layers’. SI acknowledges partial support by a CREST Grant from JST .