  The current method of growing large-area graphene on Cu surfaces
(polycrystalline foils and thin films) and its transfer to arbitrary substrates
is technologically attractive. However, the quality of graphene can be improved
significantly by growing it on single-crystal Cu surfaces. Here we show that
high quality, large-area graphene can be grown on epitaxial single-crystal
Cu(111) thin films on reusable basal-plane sapphire (alpha-Al2O3(0001))
substrates and then transferred to another substrate. While enabling graphene
growth on Cu single-crystal surfaces, this method has the potential to avoid
the high cost and extensive damage to graphene associated with sacrificing bulk
single-crystal Cu during graphene transfer.
