Interaction of metals with suspended graphene observed by transmission electron microscopy

In this Perspective, we present an overview of how different metals interface with suspended graphene, providing a closer look into the metal-graphene interaction by employing high-resolution transmission electron microscopy, especially using high-angle dark field imaging. All studied metals favor sites on the omnipresent hydrocarbon surface contamination rather than on the clean graphene surface and present nonuniform distributions, which never result in continuous films but instead in clusters or nanocrystals, indicating a weak interaction between the metal and graphene. This behavior can be altered to some degree by surface pretreatment (hydrogenation) and high-temperature vacuum annealing. Graphene etching is observed in a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) under high vacuum and 60 kV electron beam acceleration voltage conditions for all metals, except for Au. This unusual metal-mediated etching sheds new light on the metal-graphene interaction; it might explain the observed higher frequency of cluster nucleation for certain transition metals and might have implications regarding controlled nanomanipulation, that is, for self-assembly and sculpturing of future graphene-based devices.