Structural analysis of multilayer graphene via atomic moiré interferometry

Abstract

Rotational misalignment of two stacked honeycomb lattices produces a moir\'e pattern that is observable in scanning tunneling microscopy as a small modulation of the apparent surface height. This is known from experiments on highly oriented pyrolytic graphite. Here, we observe the combined effect of three-layer moir\'e patterns in multilayer graphene grown on $\text{SiC}(000\overline{1})$. Small-angle rotations between the first and third layer are shown to produce a ``double-moir\'e'' pattern, resulting from the interference of moir\'e patterns from the first three layers. These patterns are strongly affected by relative lattice strain between the layers. We model the moir\'e patterns as a beat-period of the mismatched reciprocal lattice vectors and show how these patterns can be used to determine the relative strain between lattices, in analogy to strain measurement by optical moir\'e interferometry.