Graphene is only one atom thick and becomes the ultimate thin film to explore membrane physics and mechanics. Here we study hierarchy of graphene wrinkles induced by thermal strain engineering and demonstrate that the wrinkling hierarchy can be accounted for by the wrinklon theory. We derive an equation {\lambda} = (ky)0.5 explaining evolution of wrinkling wavelength {\lambda} with the distance to the edge y observed in our experiment by considering both bending energy and stretching energy of the graphene flakes. The prefactor k in the equation is determined to be about 55 nm, which is independent of the size of the graphene flakes. Our experimental result indicates that the classical membrane behavior of graphene persists down to about 100 nm of the wrinkling wavelength.
@article{arxiv.1306.0171,
title = {Hierarchy of Graphene Wrinkles Induced by Thermal Strain Engineering},
author = {Lan Meng and Ying Su and Dechao Geng and Gui Yu and Yunqi Liu and Rui-Fen Dou and Jia-Cai Nie and Lin He},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1306.0171},
year = {2013}
}