Dresden 2011 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik

O 77: Graphene V

O 77.7: Vortrag

Donnerstag, 17. März 2011, 16:30–16:45, WIL B321

Mobility of molecular liquid layers confined between graphene and mica — •Martin Dorn, Nikolai Severin, Philipp Lange, Patrick Amsalem, Norbert Koch, and Jürgen P. Rabe — Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Department of Physics, Germany

Properties of water confined to a nano-scale are of scientific and technological interest ranging from lubrication to protein folding. Water has been demonstrated to remain liquid at room temperature when confined to different geometries ranging from confinement between two flat walls to nanopores. Recently crystalline molecular layers of water on mica surfaces have been reported, based on the visualization of graphene conforming to their surface [1]. We argue that the stable graphene topography may be caused by entrapped contaminations at the graphene-mica interface and not by the crystallinity of water. We find that contamination-free graphenes deposited on mica surfaces exhibit an atomically flat topography in the entire area independently on the ambient humidity during preparation. From this we conclude a substantial mobility of the water layer confined at the graphene-mica interface. Based on these and further experiments with confined molecular layers of other contaminated liquids we propose a model for the stabilization of the graphene topography on the liquid molecular films.

[1] K. Xu, P. Cao, J.R. Heath, Science 329 (2010) 1188.