Strain-tunable van der Waals interactions in few-layer black phosphorus

Abstract

Interlayer interactions in 2D materials, also known as van der Waals (vdWs) interactions, play a critical role in the physical properties of layered materials. It is fascinating to manipulate the vdWs interaction, and hence to "redefine" the material properties. Here, we demonstrate that in-plane biaxial strain can effectively tune the vdWs interaction of few-layer black phosphorus with thickness of 2-10 layers, using infrared spectroscopy. Surprisingly, our results reveal that in-plane tensile strain efficiently weakens the interlayer coupling, even though the sample shrinks in the vertical direction due to the Poisson effect, in sharp contrast to one's intuition. Moreover, density functional theory (DFT) calculations further confirm our observations and indicate a dominant role of the puckered lattice structure. Our study highlights the important role played by vdWs interactions in 2D materials during external physical perturbations.

23 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (5)

• The Renaissance of Black Phosphorus
• Quasiparticle band structure and tight-binding model for single- and bilayer black phosphorus
• Tuning of the electronic and optical properties of single layer black phosphorus by strain
• Infrared fingerprints of few-layer black phosphorus
• Strain-shear coupling in bilayer MoS2

Cited by in corpus (10)

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• The Optical Properties and Plasmonics of Anisotropic 2-Dimensional Materials
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• The optical conductivity of few-layer black phosphorus by infrared spectroscopy
• Microheater actuators as a versatile platform for strain engineering in 2D materials
• Giant piezoresistive effect and strong band gap tunability in ultrathin InSe upon biaxial strain
• Layer-dependent pressure effect on electronic structures of 2D black phosphorus
• Anisotropic Infrared Response and Orientation-dependent Strain-tuning of the Electronic Structure in Nb2SiTe4
• Role of Interlayer Coupling in the Second Harmonic Generation of Bilayer Transition-metal Dichalcogenides
• Strong effects of uniaxial pressure and short-range correlations in Cr2Ge2Te6