Controlled ripple texturing of suspended graphene and ultrathin graphite membranes.

By Wenzhong Bao, Feng Miao, Zhen Chen, Hang Zhang, W. Jang, C. Dames, C. N. Lau. Nature Nanotechnology, 2009

1,237 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Graphene is nature's thinnest elastic material and displays exceptional mechanical and electronic properties. Ripples are an intrinsic feature of graphene sheets and are expected to strongly influence electronic properties by inducing effective magnetic fields and changing local potentials. The ability to control ripple structure in graphene could allow device design based on local strain and selective bandgap engineering. Here, we report the first direct observation and controlled creation of one- and two-dimensional periodic ripples in suspended graphene sheets, using both spontaneously and thermally generated strains. We are able to control ripple orientation, wavelength and amplitude by controlling boundary conditions and making use of graphene's negative thermal expansion coefficient (TEC), which we measure to be much larger than that of graphite. These results elucidate the ripple formation process, which can be understood in terms of classical thin-film elasticity theory. This should lead to an improved understanding of suspended graphene devices, a controlled engineering of thermal stress in large-scale graphene electronics, and a systematic investigation of the effect of ripples on the electronic properties of graphene.

Subfields: Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4c17f84502e4fc314ee31e73443bb09db210a09f

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Citations in the corpus

New directions in science and technology: two-dimensional crystals (2011, background): “ZA and ZO are acoustical and optical flexural modes (adapted from [15]).”
Catalyst-free growth of nanographene films on various substrates (2011, background): “The thermal expansion of nanographene film is not considered here as the effect is very small and does not change linearly but peaks at around 350 K [30].”
Scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy of ultra-flat graphene on hexagonal boron nitride. (2011, background): “However, the freely suspended monolayers are very delicate, leading to fabrication difficulties as well as strain[16].”
Electronic transport in two-dimensional graphene (2010, background): “On the other hand, one could deliberately induce lattice defects (Chen et al., 2009c) or create controlled ripples by straining graphene before cooling and exploiting graphene’s negative thermal expansion coefficient (Balandin et al., 2008; Bao et al., 2009).”
Impermeability of graphene and its applications (2013, background): “The calculated wrinkle wavelength of 20 nm matched with the experimental values of 40–70 nm, with the amplitude, A, of the wrinkles due to the in-plane shear estimated to be 28 nm (A = (Lt/k)[8/(3 + 3m)], [45] where m is the Poisson ratio and L is the length of the cell).”
Wafer-Scale Growth of Single-Crystal Monolayer Graphene on Reusable Hydrogen-Terminated Germanium (2014, methodology): “Instead of Si, we used a singlecrystal Ge surface for the growth of single-crystal graphene, because of (i) its catalytic activity, which can lower the energy barriers for the catalytic decomposition of carbon precursor and thus can induce formation of graphitic carbon on the surface (17); (ii) the ”
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Large scale atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition of graphene (2013, background): “[43] Bao W, Miao F, Chen Z, Zhang H, Jang W, Dames C, et al.”