Topographic and electronic contrast of the graphene moire on Ir(111) probed by scanning tunneling microscopy and non-contact atomic force microscopy

Epitaxial graphene grown on transition metal surfaces typically exhibits a moire pattern due to the lattice mismatch between graphene and the underlying metal surface. We use both scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) experiments to probe the electronic and topographic contrast of the graphene moire on the Ir(111) surface. While STM topography is influenced by the local density of states close to the Fermi energy and the local tunneling barrier height, AFM is capable of yielding the true surface topography once the background force arising from the van der Waals (vdW) interaction between the tip and the substrate is taken into account. We observe a moire corrugation of 35$pm$10 pm, where the graphene-Ir(111) distance is the smallest in the areas where the graphene honeycomb is atop the underlying iridium atoms and larger on the fcc or hcp threefold hollow sites.