Rights statement: This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Nano Letters, copyright © 2015 American Chemical Society after peer review and technical editing by the publisher. To access the final edited and published work see http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b03928
Accepted author manuscript, 2.84 MB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
<mark>Journal publication date</mark> | 13/01/2016 |
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<mark>Journal</mark> | Nano Letters |
Issue number | 1 |
Volume | 16 |
Number of pages | 7 |
Pages (from-to) | 355-361 |
Publication Status | Published |
Early online date | 1/12/15 |
<mark>Original language</mark> | English |
Organic covalent functionalization of graphene with long-range periodicity is highly desirable-it is anticipated to provide control over its electronic, optical, or magnetic properties-and remarkably challenging. In this work we describe a method for the covalent modification of graphene with strict spatial periodicity at the nanometer scale. The periodic landscape is provided by a single monolayer of graphene grown on Ru(0001) that presents a moiré pattern due to the mismatch between the carbon and ruthenium hexagonal lattices. The moiré contains periodically arranged areas where the graphene-ruthenium interaction is enhanced and shows higher chemical reactivity. This phenomenon is demonstrated by the attachment of cyanomethyl radicals (CH2CN•) produced by homolytic breaking of acetonitrile (CH3CN), which is shown to present a nearly complete selectivity (>98%) binding covalently to graphene on specific atomic sites. This method can be extended to other organic nitriles, paving the way for the attachment of functional molecules.