Electromechanical Properties of Graphene Drumheads
Straining Suspended Graphene
The electronic properties of graphene are best displayed by suspended sheets free from contact with an underlying substrate. Klimov et al. (p. 1557) probed how deformation of suspended graphene sheets could lead to further tuning of its electronic properties with a scanning tunneling microscope; the graphene sheets could also be deformed via an electric field from an underlying electrode. Spectroscopic studies reveal that the induced strain led to charge-carrier localization into spatially confined quantum dots, an effect consistent with the formation of strain-induced pseudomagnetic fields.
Abstract
We determined the electromechanical properties of a suspended graphene layer by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) measurements, as well as computational simulations of the graphene-membrane mechanics and morphology. A graphene membrane was continuously deformed by controlling the competing interactions with a STM probe tip and the electric field from a back-gate electrode. The probe tip–induced deformation created a localized strain field in the graphene lattice. STS measurements on the deformed suspended graphene display an electronic spectrum completely different from that of graphene supported by a substrate. The spectrum indicates the formation of a spatially confined quantum dot, in agreement with recent predictions of confinement by strain-induced pseudomagnetic fields.
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Published In
Science
Volume 336 | Issue 6088
22 June 2012
22 June 2012
Copyright
Copyright © 2012, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 9 February 2012
Accepted: 30 April 2012
Published in print: 22 June 2012
Acknowledgments
We thank M. Stiles and S. Adam for valuable discussions and S. Blankenship and A. Band for technical assistance. The U.S. National Science Foundation is gratefully acknowledged via grants CMMI-1069076 and CMMI-1129826 (T.L. and S.Z.) and grant CMMI-0841840 (C.A.W. and S.D.S.).
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