Abstract
Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) is generally utilized for producing large area, good quality graphene films on suitable substrates. Copper (Cu) substrate is used mainly as a substrate and catalyst during graphene synthesis process by CVD technique. The purpose of the present work is to investigate the evolution of Cu surface morphology after graphene growth and its influence on grown graphene quality. In this study, graphene was grown using methane as the carbon source at temperature of 1040 oC for 5 minutes. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Optical Microscopy (OM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) were utilized to analyze the change of Cu surface morphology after graphene synthesis. Raman spectroscopy was used to characterize the characteristics of grown graphene. SEM and AFM results showed that copper substrate surface morphology was modified after annealing and graphene growth associated with formation of large size Cu particles located basically on the surface terraces, resulting in deposition of multilayer, very small graphene domains aligned linearly along rolling marks direction.