Elastic straining of free-standing monolayer graphene

K Cao and SZ Feng and Y Han and LB Gao and TH Ly and ZP Xu and Y Lu, NATURE COMMUNICATIONS, 11, 284 (2020).

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-14130-0

The sp(2) nature of graphene endows the hexagonal lattice with very high theoretical stiffness, strength and resilience, all well-documented. However, the ultimate stretchability of graphene has not yet been demonstrated due to the difficulties in experimental design. Here, directly performing in situ tensile tests in a scanning electron microscope after developing a protocol for sample transfer, shaping and straining, we report the elastic properties and stretchability of free- standing single-crystalline monolayer graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition. The measured Young's modulus is close to 1 TPa, aligning well with the theoretical value, while the representative engineering tensile strength reaches similar to 50-60GPa with sample-wide elastic strain up to similar to 6%. Our findings demonstrate that single- crystalline monolayer graphene can indeed display near ideal mechanical performance, even in a large area with edge defects, as well as resilience and mechanical robustness that allows for flexible electronics and mechatronics applications.

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