Epitaxial graphene: a new material

Graphene, a two-dimensional sheet of sp2-bonded car-bon arranged in a honeycomb lattice, is not only the building block of fullerenes, carbon nano tubes (CNTs) and graphite, it also has interesting properties, which have caused a flood of activities in the past few years. The possibility to grow graphitic films with thick-nesses down to a single graphene layer epitaxially on SiC{0001} surfaces is promising for future applications. The two-dimensional nature of epitaxial graphene films make them ideal objects for surface science techniques such as photoelectron spectroscopy, low-energy electron diffraction, and scanning probe microscopy. The present article summarizes results from recent photoemission studies covering a variety of aspects such as the growth of epitaxial graphene and few layer graphene, the elec