Wang, FLiu, GRothwell, SNevius, MTajeda, ATaleb-Ibrahimi, AFeldman, L CCohen, P IConrad, E H2013-10-102013-10-102013-06-18arXiv:1306.3196https://hdl.handle.net/11299/157904This paper is a report of a discovery that graphene grown on SiC which has previously been treated with NO will develop a bandgap. The paper includes hypotheses that explain the bandgap formation.All carbon electronics based on graphene has been an elusive goal. For more than a decade, the inability to produce significant band-gaps in this material has prevented the development of semiconducting graphene. While chemical functionalization was thought to be a route to semiconducting graphene, disorder in the chemical adsorbates, leading to low mobilities, have proved to be a hurdle in its production. We demonstrate a new approach to produce semiconducting graphene that uses a small concentration of covalently bonded surface nitrogen, not as a means to functionalize graphene, but instead as a way to constrain and bend graphene. We demonstrate that a submonolayer concentration of nitrogen on SiC is sufficient to pin epitaxial graphene to the SiC interface as it grows, causing the graphene to buckle. The resulting 3-dimensional modulation of the graphene opens a band-gap greater than 0.7eV in the otherwise continuous metallic graphene sheet.en-USgrapheneimpuritybandgapSiCPreprint