Tailoring energy landscape of graphene nanostructures on graphene and realizing atomically precise graphene origami using tilt grain boundaries

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how tilt grain boundaries in graphene can be used to controllably tailor the energy landscape and achieve atomically precise graphene origami, advancing the manipulation of 2D material structures.

Contribution

It introduces a method to control the adhesive energy landscape of graphene nanostructures using tilt grain boundaries, enabling precise folding and unfolding.

Findings

Tunable twist angles stabilize graphene nanostructures.

Tilt grain boundaries enable repeated folding along the boundary.

Energy landscape can be precisely engineered for 2D materials.

Abstract

In two-dimensional van der Waals (vdWs) materials, the relative twist angle between adjacent layers not only controls their electronic properties, but also determines their stacking energy. This effect makes it much easier to realize energetically favorable configurations of the vdWs materials, for example, Bernal-stacked structure of bilayer graphene. Here we demonstrate that we can controllably tailor adhesive energy landscape of graphene nanostructures on graphene and stabilize the system with tunable twist angle by using a one-dimensional tilt grain boundary (GB). The area ratio with different stacking orders separated by tilt GB is continuously tuned, which provides a new degree of freedom to tailor the energy landscape of the system. Due to the different stacking orders separated by the tilt GB, we can repeatedly fold and unfold the graphene nanostructure exactly along the one-dimensional boundary, demonstrating the ability to realize atomically precise graphene origami.