Rashba splitting of 100 meV in Au-intercalated graphene on SiC

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. Here, we report the preparation of an almost pure p-type graphene phase after Au intercalation. We observe a 100 meV Rashba-type spin-orbit splitting at 0.9 eV binding energy. 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.