Heating Isotopically Labelled Bernal Stacked Graphene: a Raman Spectroscopy Study

Abstract: One of the greatest issues of nanoelectronics today is how to control the heating of the components. Graphene is a promising material in this area and it is essential to study its thermal properties. Here, the effect of heating a bilayer structure was investigated using in situ Raman spectroscopy. In order to observe the effects on each individual layer, an isotopically labelled bilayer graphene was synthesized where the two layers are composed of different carbon isotopes. Therefore, the frequency of the phonons in the Raman spectra is shifted in relation to each other. This technique was used to investigate the influence of different stacking order. It was found that in bilayer graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) the two layers behave very similarly, for both Bernal stacking and randomly oriented structures, while for transferred samples the layers act more independently. This highlights a significant dependence on sample preparation procedure.