| AVS 60th International Symposium and Exhibition | |
| Graphene and Other 2D Materials Focus Topic | Thursday Sessions |
| Session GR+AS+NS+SS-ThM |
| Session: | 2D Materials: Nanostructures |
| Presenter: | M. Yamamoto, University of Maryland |
| Authors: | M. Yamamoto, University of Maryland O. Pierre-Louis, Univ. Lyon 1-CNRS, France J. Huang, University of Maryland M.S. Fuhrer, University of Maryland & Monash University, Australia T.L. Einstein, University of Maryland W.G. Cullen, University of Maryland |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Thin membranes exhibit complex responses to external forces or geometrical constraints. A familiar example is the wrinkling instability, exhibited by human skin, plant leaves, and fabrics, resulting from the relative ease of bending versus stretching. We have carried out a systematic study of the wrinkling instability of graphene membranes supported on SiO2 substrates with randomly placed silica nanoparticles [1]. At small nanoparticle density, monolayer graphene adheres to the substrate and is highly conformal over the nanoparticles, detached only in small regions around them. With increasing nanoparticle density, and decreasing nanoparticle separation to about 100 nm, graphene’s elastic response dominates substrate adhesion, and the elastic stretching energy is reduced by the formation of wrinkles which connect the protrusions. Above a critical nanoparticle density, the wrinkles form what is evidently a percolating network across the sample. As the graphene membrane is made thicker, delamination from the substrate is observed. Since the wrinkling instability acts to remove inhomogeneous in-plane elastic strains through out-of-plane buckling, our results can be used to place limits on the possible in-plane strain magnitudes that may be created in graphene to realized strain-engineered electronic structures.
Work at UMD supported by NSF under MRSEC Grant DMR 05-20471 and Grant DMR 08-04976
[1] M. Yamamoto et al., Phys. Rev. X 2 (2012) 041018.