Altering the chemical reactivity of graphene can offer new opportunities for various applications. Here, we report that monolayers of densely packed n-pentacontane significantly reduce the covalent grafting of aryl radicals to graphitic surfaces. The effect is highly local in nature and on fully covered substrates grafting can occur only at monolayer imperfections such as interdomain borders and vacancy defects. Grafting partially covered substrates primarily results in the covalent modification of uncoated areas. crosscheck: This document is CrossCheck deposited related_data: Supplementary Information identifier: Hans Van Gorp (ORCID) identifier: Yoshito Tobe (ORCID) identifier: Hiroshi Uji-i (ORCID) identifier: Stijn F. L. Mertens (ORCID) identifier: Steven De Feyter (ORCID) copyright_licence: The Royal Society of Chemistry has an exclusive publication licence for this journal history: Received 2 January 2017; Accepted 19 March 2017; Accepted Manuscript published 28 March 2017; Advance Article published 10 April 2017; Version of Record published 20 April 2017 ispartof: Nanoscale vol:9 issue:16 pages:5188-5193 ispartof: location:England status: published
