Interlayer binding energy of graphite -- A direct experimental determination

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.