Elastic straining of free-standing monolayer graphene

Ke Cao, Shizhe Feng, Ying Han, Libo Gao, Thuc Hue Ly, Zhiping Xu*, Yang Lu*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Journal Publications and ReviewsRGC 21 - Publication in refereed journalpeer-review

315 Citations (Scopus)
155 Downloads (CityUHK Scholars)

Abstract

The sp2 nature of graphene endows the hexagonal lattice with very high theoretical stiffness, strength and resilience, all well-documented. However, the ultimate stretchability of graphene has not yet been demonstrated due to the difficulties in experimental design. Here, directly performing in situ tensile tests in a scanning electron microscope after developing a protocol for sample transfer, shaping and straining, we report the elastic properties and stretchability of free-standing single-crystalline monolayer graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition. The measured Young’s modulus is close to 1 TPa, aligning well with the theoretical value, while the representative engineering tensile strength reaches ~50-60 GPa with sample-wide elastic strain up to ~6%. Our findings demonstrate that single-crystalline monolayer graphene can indeed display near ideal mechanical performance, even in a large area with edge defects, as well as resilience and mechanical robustness that allows for flexible electronics and mechatronics applications.
Original languageEnglish
Article number284
JournalNature Communications
Volume11
Online published15 Jan 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Funding

We acknowledge the financial supports from Hong Kong Research Grant Council (RGC) under the GRF CityU11216515, CityU11207416 and ECS CityU21303218, City University of Hong Kong under SRG 7004857, and National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) through Grant no. 11825203 and no. 11922215. We gratefully thank Xufen Xiao for the Ramen spectroscopy characterization.

Publisher's Copyright Statement

  • This full text is made available under CC-BY 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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