Nanomechanical measurements of minimally twisted van der Waals materials remained elusive despite their fundamental importance for device realisation. Here, we use Ultrasonic Force Microscopy (UFM) to locally quantify the variation of out-of-plane Young's modulus in minimally twisted double bilayer graphene (TDBG). We reveal a softening of the Young's modulus by 7\% and 17\% along single and double domain walls, respectively. Our experimental results are confirmed by force-field relaxation models. This study highlights the strong tunability of nanomechanical properties in engineered twisted materials, and paves the way for future applications of designer 2D nanomechanical systems.
@article{arxiv.2405.12610,
title = {Quantifying the local mechanical properties of twisted double bilayer graphene},
author = {Alessandra Canetta and Sergio Gonzalez-Munoz and Viet-Hung Nguyen and Khushboo Agarwal and Pauline de Crombrugghe de Picquendaele and Yuanzhuo Hong and Sambit Mohapatra and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi and Bernard Nysten and Benoît Hackens and Rebeca Ribeiro-Palau and Jean-Christophe Charlier and Oleg Kolosov and Jean Spièce and Pascal Gehring},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.12610},
year = {2024}
}