ABSTRACT
Intercalation of Au can produce giant Rashba-type spin-orbit splittings in graphene, but this has not yet been achieved on a semiconductor substrate. For graphene/SiC(0001), Au intercalation yields two phases with different doping. We observe a 100 meV Rashba-type spin-orbit splitting at 0.9 eV binding energy in the case of p-type graphene after Au intercalation. We show that this giant splitting is due to hybridization and much more limited in energy and momentum space than for Au-intercalated graphene on Ni.
We thank Felix Fromm for providing zero-layer graphene/SiC samples. This work was supported by SPP 1459 of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and by “Impuls- und Vernetzungsfonds der Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft” (Grant No. HRJRG-408).
