Professor Yang Lu of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and his team worked on the research for the topic “Tuning instability in suspended monolayer 2D materials”. The research findings were recently published in Nature Communications on May 13, 2024.
Details of the publication:
Tuning instability in suspended monolayer 2D materials
Yuan Hou, Jingzhuo Zhou, Zezhou He, Juzheng Chen, Mengya Zhu, HengAn Wu & Yang Lu, article in Nature Communications
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48345-7
Abstract
Monolayer two-dimensional (2D) materials possess excellent in-plane mechanical strength yet extremely low bending stiffness, making them particularly susceptible to instability, which is anticipated to have a substantial impact on their physical functionalities such as 2D-based Micro/Nanoelectromechanical systems (M/NEMS), nanochannels, and proton transport membrane. In this work, we achieve quantitatively tuning instability in suspended 2D materials including monolayer graphene and MoS2 by employing a push-to-shear strategy. We comprehensively examine the dynamic wrinkling-splitting-smoothing process and find that monolayer 2D materials experience stepwise instabilities along with different recovery processes. These stepwise instabilities are governed by the materials’ geometry, pretension, and the elastic nonlinearity. We attribute the different instability and recovery paths to the local stress redistribution in monolayer 2D materials. The tunable instability behavior of suspended monolayer 2D materials not only allows measuring their bending stiffness but also opens up new opportunities for programming the nanoscale instability pattern and even physical properties of atomically thin films.