Nanoscale strain engineering of graphene devices with tuneable electronic correlation for quantum valleytronics and spintronics

Abstract

A strain engineered material including a monolayer graphene sheet comprising an array of wrinkles induced by deformations in the graphene sheet, the deformations formed by a lattice of underlying nanostructures on a substrate. The lattice of nanostructures comprises rows of the nanostructures and each of the wrinkles comprise a ridge aligned on top of a different one of the rows and along an alignment direction defined by the rows. The deformations pattern a strain distribution in the graphene sheet that induces a periodically varying pseudo magnetic field distribution ranging between a positive value and a negative values. The periodically varying pseudo magnetic field distribution has field magnitude minima located parallel to and between the ridges and field magnitude maxima located near to and parallel to each of the ridges and can be designed for various valleytronic and spintronic device applications.