Designing Slip and Strain into 2D Material Heterostructure Devices

Mechanical strain and deformation offer an unprecedented ability to tailor the symmetry and structure of 2D materials and resulting electronic properties, making it important to diverse technologies like heterogeneous integration with CMOS, stretchable electronics, and engineering quantum systems. Across applications, understanding the nanoscale mechanics will enable the prediction and design of strain dependent properties and integration into devices. Here, we utilize atomic to micro scale imaging to unravel the breakdown of continuum mechanics and new scaling laws in the atomic limit, and their influence on the electronic properties of 2D materials. We will cover examples including: (1) Demonstrating designable strain using thin film stressors, which can be used to spatially pattern the electronic structure of 2D materials or interfacial heterostrain tuning of the moire superlattice. (2) Imaging the nanoscale shape of bends in 2D heterostructures and discovering the scaling laws that define interlayer slip at van der Waals interfaces, enabling membranes orders of magnitude more deformable than conventional thin films, (3) Leveraging these insights to demonstrate the feasibility of strain and deformation engineering for applications such as mobility enhancement in 2D transistors, deformable transistors, and reconfigurable nanoelectromechanical systems.