Thermal mirror buckling in freestanding graphene locally controlled by scanning tunneling microscopy

Abstract

Knowledge of and control over the curvature of ripples in freestanding graphene are desirable for fabricating and designing flexible electronic devices, and recent progress in these pursuits has been achieved using several advanced techniques such as scanning tunneling microscopy. The electrostatic forces induced through a bias voltage (or gate voltage) were used to manipulate the interaction of freestanding graphene with a tip (substrate). Such forces can cause large movements and sudden changes in curvature through mirror buckling. Here we explore an alternative mechanism, thermal load, to control the curvature of graphene. We demonstrate thermal mirror buckling of graphene by scanning tunneling microscopy and large-scale molecular dynamic simulations. The negative thermal expansion coefficient of graphene is an essential ingredient in explaining the observed effects. This new control mechanism represents a fundamental advance in understanding the influence of temperature gradients on the dynamics of freestanding graphene and future applications with electro-thermal-mechanical nanodevices.

25 pages, 5 figures

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Anomalous Dynamical Behavior of Freestanding Graphene Membranes
• Graphene Ripples as a Realization of a Two-Dimensional Ising Model: A Scanning Tunneling Microscope Study
• Defects induce phase transition from dynamic to static rippling in graphene
• STM driven transition from rippled to buckled graphene in a spin-membrane model
• Multifractal wave functions of charge carriers in graphene with folded deformations, ripples or uniaxial flexural modes: analogies to the quantum Hall effect under random pseudomagnetic fields
• Determination of the STM tip-graphene repulsive forces by comparative STM and AFM measurements on suspended graphene
• Apparent rippling with honeycomb symmetry and tunable periodicity observed by scanning tunneling microscopy on suspended graphene
• Geometric control of tilt transition dynamics in single-clamped thermalized elastic sheets
• Buckling in a rotationally invariant spin-elastic model