The Thinnest Carpet on the Smallest Staircase: The Growth of Graphene on Rh(533)

We here discuss the growth process and the properties of single-layer graphene on a vicinal Rh(533) surface. The structural anisotropy of the substrate leads to a moire cell with nonequivalent lattice vectors in the directions parallel and orthogonal to the steps. Our results indicate that the high structural quality of the carbon layer, combined with the weaker interaction with the substrate and the higher thermal stability with respect to graphene on Rh(111), is strongly influenced by the presence of the surface steps, which play a fundamental role in the defect-healing mechanism first predicted by earlier theoretical calculations.