Atomic modification of graphene on silicon carbide : adsorption and intercalation

Graphene, the first truly 2D material to be isolated, is host to a wealth of remarkable properties. It can be modified in a variety of ways—strained, twisted, stacked, placed on a substrate, decorated with adatoms, etc.—to further enhance these properties or introduce new ones. In this thesis, we use several complementary surface characterization techniques to study two methods of modifying epitaxial graphene on a silicon carbide (SiC) substrate via the addition of other atoms. In the first method, we induce the Kekulé distortion—a periodic distortion of the bonds in graphene—using a small number of lithium atoms (