Electron beam nanosculpting of suspended graphene sheets

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for high-resolution nanosculpting of suspended graphene sheets using a focused electron beam, enabling stable nanostructures without long-range distortion.

Contribution

It introduces a controlled electron beam technique for precise, rapid, and stable nanoscale modifications of suspended graphene sheets.

Findings

Nanometer-scale pores, slits, and gaps can be reliably created.

The technique produces stable features that do not evolve over time.

Material removal does not cause long-range distortion of the graphene sheets.

Abstract

We demonstrate high-resolution modification of suspended multi-layer graphene sheets by controlled exposure to the focused electron beam of a transmission electron microscope. We show that this technique can be used to realize, on timescales of a few seconds, a variety of features, including nanometer-scale pores, slits, and gaps that are stable and do not evolve over time. Despite the extreme thinness of the suspended graphene sheets, extensive removal of material to produce the desired feature geometries is found to not introduce long-range distortion of the suspended sheet structure.