Towards a Complete Understanding of the Interaction of Graphene and h-BN with Metal Supports: Influence of Substrate Crystallographic Orientation

Predicting the properties that graphene and h-BN will exhibit after their growth on a certain substrate is a major challenge. While the influence on these properties of the electron configuration of the atoms in the underlying surface is well-understood, the effects of substrate geometry still remain unclear. Herein, the structural properties of h-BN monolayers grown on the rectangularly-packed Rh(110) surface are characterized and compared to those that both this material and graphene exhibit on substrates with different crystallographic orientations. STM images acquired on h-BN monolayers grown on Rh(110) are dominated by only a single quasi-one-dimensional moiré pattern suggesting a strong interaction at the interface. Interestingly, the moiré stripes exhibit an unexpectedly small corrugation in comparison to all the strongly interacting interfaces with hexagonal substrates previously reported. This discrepancy is explained by the differences in the possible binding landscapes for differently oriented substrates. As a result, a rule is derived to predict how the corrugation at the interface will depend on the substrate symmetry.