The positive piezoconductive effect in graphene
Abstract
As the thinnest conductive and elastic material, graphene is expected to play a crucial role in post-Moore era. Besides applications on electronic devices, graphene has shown great potential for nano-electromechanical systems. While interlayer interactions play a key role in modifying the electronic structures of layered materials, no attention has been given to their impact on electromechanical properties. Here we report the positive piezoconductive effect observed in suspended bi- and multi-layer graphene. The effect is highly layer number dependent and shows the most pronounced response for tri-layer graphene. The effect, and its dependence on the layer number, can be understood as resulting from the strain-induced competition between interlayer coupling and intralayer transport, as confirmed by the numerical calculations based on the non-equilibrium Green's function method. Our results enrich the understanding of graphene and point to layer number as a powerful tool for tuning the electromechanical properties of graphene for future applications.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1507.06026,
title = {The positive piezoconductive effect in graphene},
author = {Kang Xu and Ke Wang and Wei Zhao and Wenzhong Bao and Erfu Liu and Yafei Ren and Miao Wang and Yajun Fu and Junwen Zeng and Zhaoguo Li and Wei Zhou and Fengqi Song and Xinran Wang and Yi Shi and Xiangang Wan and Michael S. Fuhrer and Baigeng Wang and Zhenhua Qiao and Feng Miao and Dingyu Xing},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.06026},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Accepted by Nature Communications; 36 pages, 4 figures, 11 supplementary figures