Measurements of the adhesion energy of graphene to metallic substrates

We report a nano-scale quantification study of the adhesion energy of chemically vapor deposited (CVD) graphene on Cu and Ni. The adhesion energy of graphene on Cu and Ni substrates was measured to be 12.8 and 72.7 Jm−2, respectively. Density functional theory shows that the graphene/Ni interface exhibits more covalent bonding than graphene/Cu which is partially ionic, hence the reason for the higher adhesion energy for graphene/Ni. We believe that this nano-scale adhesion energy measurement method could be further extended for measuring the adhesion energy of other 2D materials.