Fabrication of comb-drive actuators for straining nanostructured suspended graphene

Abstract

We report on the fabrication and characterization of an optimized comb-drive actuator design for strain-dependent transport measurements on suspended graphene. We fabricate devices from highly p-doped silicon using deep reactive ion etching with a chromium mask. Crucially, we implement a gold layer to reduce the device resistance from $\approx 51.6$ k$\mathrm{\Omega }$ to $\approx 236$ $\mathrm{\Omega }$ at room temperature in order to allow for strain-dependent transport measurements. The graphene is integrated by mechanically transferring it directly onto the actuator using a polymethylmethacrylate membrane. Importantly, the integrated graphene can be nanostructured afterwards to optimize device functionality. The minimum feature size of the structured suspended graphene is 30 nm, which allows for interesting device concepts such as mechanically-tunable nanoconstrictions. Finally, we characterize the fabricated devices by measuring the Raman spectrum as well as the a mechanical resonance frequency of an integrated graphene sheet for different strain values.

arXiv comment10 pages, 9 figures

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Tuning dissipation dilution in 2D material resonators by MEMS-induced tension
• Phonon Scattering at Kinks in Suspended Graphene
• Integrated impedance bridge for absolute capacitance measurements at cryogenic temperatures and finite magnetic fields
• Engineering tunable strain fields in suspended graphene by microelectromechanical systems
• Tunable coupling of two mechanical resonators by a graphene membrane