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NANOMECHANICS

Bending with slip

Nature Materials volume 19, pages 259–260 (2020)Cite this article

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Bending of few-layer graphene leads to interlayer slip, and slipping lowers the bending stiffness. Beyond a critical bending angle, the graphene layers bend like a stack of paper, with a state of superlubricity for interlayer slip.

A stack of paper sheets can be bent easily unless they are all stuck together — for example, by sticky glue in between the sheets. One can imagine that a stack of atomic sheets, such as graphene (a monolayer of carbon atoms), would bend similarly — easy to bend if the atomic sheets can slide against each other but much harder to bend if the sheets are bonded together to prohibit sliding. As graphene and other two-dimensional (2D) crystal sheets continue their run as wonder materials that show ever intriguing properties (with mechanical behaviour being important for their practical applications), it has remained a puzzle about how they would bend, depending on how they would slide as they are stacked in atomically close proximity. Now in a work published in Nature Materials, Edmund Han and co-workers1 offer a convincing argument, by unifying continuum and atomic models based on experiments and computations, which could essentially solve this puzzle. They find that the bending stiffness of few-layer graphene (FLG) decreases as a function of the bending angle, resulting from increasing atomic interlayer slip. Beyond a critical bending angle, the graphene layers bend like a stack of paper, with superlubricity (frictionless) between the layers.

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Fig. 1: Schematic of the heterostructure, showing a graphene bilayer (black) on top of an hBN step (red), with a radius of curvature (R), and a bending angle (θ) for the two bending sections.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Rui Huang

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  1. Rui Huang
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Correspondence to Rui Huang.

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Huang, R. Bending with slip. Nat. Mater. 19, 259–260 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-020-0604-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-020-0604-0

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