  Despite interlayer binding energy is one of the most important material
properties for graphite, there is still lacking report on its direct
experimental determination. In this paper, we present a novel experimental
method to directly measure the interlayer binding energy of highly oriented
pyrolytic graphite (HOPG). The obtained values of the binding energy are
0.27($\pm $0.02)J/m$^{2}$, which can serve as a benchmark for other theoretical
and experimental works.
