Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Commons^™

Nanoscale Manipulation Of Pristine And Functionalized Freestanding Graphene Using Scanning Tunneling Microscopy, Matthew Ackerman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Over the past ten years the 2D material graphene has attracted an enourmous amount of attention from researchers from across diciplines and all over the world. Many of its outstanding electronic properties are present only when it is not interacting with a substrate but is instead freestanding. In this work I demonstrate that pristine and functionalized freestanding graphene can be imaged using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and that imaging a flexible 2D surface is fundamentally different from imaging a bulk material due to the attraction between the STM tip and the sample. This attraction can be used to manipulate …