▎ 摘　　要

Lithium metal anode has attracted soaring attention for high energy batteries. However, uncontrollable growth of dendritic Li and high chemical reactivity with electrolyte incur serious safety issues, hindering its practical applications. Carbon materials and their composites with controllable structures and properties, have been explored to address these issues and show great potential for lithium anode protection as stable scaffolds or Li storage reservoirs. However, the study of heterogeneous nucleation and growth of Li on carbon surfaces, especially on the basal plane of graphite layers, which is the dominating surface for graphene, carbon nanotube, and many other advanced carbon materials, remains empty, attributing to the lack of a perfect (planar and clean) deposition substrate. Herein, we adopt a single-layer graphene grown on Cu foil as an ideal Li plating substrate to reveal the fundamental behavior of Li metal nucleation and growth on carbon surface for the first time. We demonstrate that single-layer graphene on Cu foil, with nearly perfect structure, has a higher energy barrier for Li nucleation than Cu. Thus, it is more likely to form isolated and thicker dendrite layer on the carbon basal plane, and continuous dendrite was formed easily from Li nuclei even at a low Li deposited capacity of 30 mu A h cm(-2). Thereby, carbon materials with basal plane-dominated structures are proved lithiophobic and not suitable for the matrix of Li-metal anode. Our approach could lead to the realization of fundamental understanding of Li metal heterogeneous nucleation and growth on carbon surface with various electronic properties.