We examine the competition between adhesive and bending energies for few-layered graphene samples placed on rigid, microscale-corrugated substrates. Using atomic force microscopy, we show that the graphene undergoes a sharp "snap-through" transition as a function of layer thickness, where the material transitions between conforming to the substrate and lying flat on top of the substrate. By utilizing the critical snap-through thickness in an elasticity model for the FLG's bending, we extract a value for graphene-surface adhesion energy that is larger than expected for van der Waals forces.
@article{arxiv.1109.5962,
title = {Observation of a Snap-Through Instability in Graphene},
author = {Scott Scharfenberg and Nikhita Mansukhani and Cesar Chialvo and Richard L. Weaver and Nadya Mason},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1109.5962},
year = {2015}
}