Highly Stretchable MoS$_2$ Kirigami

TL;DR

This study uses molecular dynamics simulations to demonstrate that kirigami patterning significantly enhances the stretchability and fracture strain of MoS₂ nanoribbons, indicating a promising approach for flexible nanomaterials.

Contribution

It introduces a kirigami design method for MoS₂ that substantially improves its mechanical stretchability and fracture resistance.

Findings

Tensile yield increased by a factor of four.

Fracture strains increased by a factor of six.

Kirigami enhances ductility of 2D nanomaterials.

Abstract

We report the results of classical molecular dynamics simulations focused on studying the mechanical properties of MoS$_{2}$ kirigami. Several different kirigami structures were studied based upon two simple non-dimensional parameters, which are related to the density of cuts, as well as the ratio of the overlapping cut length to the nanoribbon length. Our key finding is significant enhancements in tensile yield (by a factor of four) and fracture strains (by a factor of six) as compared to pristine MoS$_{2}$ nanoribbons. These results in conjunction with recent results on graphene suggest that the kirigami approach may be a generally useful one for enhancing the ductility of two-dimensional nanomaterials.